Kim Garcia

Kim Garcia (b.1989, San Diego, CA) is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Her practice centers on oral storytelling to explore the complexities of inheritance, postcolonial identity, and the lasting effects on history in the present. Stemming from her lived experiences as the daughter of immigrants, Garcia traces how personal memory expands into questions of belonging, power, and the making of American identity. Working across sculpture, installation, drawing, and painting, she uses material processes to engage what resists closure, approaching history as something active and embodied. Through folding, compression, and accumulation, Garcia constructs forms that reflect how memory and history are continually reshaped, bringing together diverse materials into fused structures with layered meanings.

Recent projects move from intimate family narratives outward to examine Filipino American identity and U.S. imperial histories, extending private memory into larger geopolitical frameworks. Moving between small-scale objects and immersive installations, Garcia creates environments that combine sculptural materials, architecture, and sensory experience to invite viewers to reconsider America as shaped by layered arrivals, contested belonging, and unfinished histories.

Kim Garcia holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine and a BA from the University of California, San Diego. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, CA; Feia Gallery, Los Angeles; CA; DMST Atelier, Los Angeles, CA; Phase Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICALA), CA; and Torrance Art Museum, CA. Garcia is the founder of The Cold Read, a writing-based critique collective, and co-founder of After Hours Gallery.