Karla García

Karla Garcia is a Mexican multidisciplinary artist known for her cactus-inspired clay sculptures. Raised between Juarez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, she explores themes of identity, heritage and immigration through sculptures and installations inspired by the desert borderland shared between Mexico and the United States – the landscape that shaped her upbringing.  Conceived almost as a self-portrait, the cactus forms evoke Garcia’s collective and personal identity, a reference to Mexican heritage and a symbol of resilience. One of her most poignant projects, La Línea Imaginaria (2022), is a binational and site-specific installation composed of 50 ceramic cacti divided between El Paso, in Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, in Mexico. The “linea imaginaria” (imaginary line) refers to the border routinely crossed by Garcia’s community, a frontier where a shared cultural identity exists beyond national boundaries. Merging nature-inspired forms, found materials and clay, Garcia’s work is deeply tied to the land – its earth, its histories and legacy.  She mainly uses coil-building and hand-pinching techniques to create her ceramic vessels. In the creative process, some works remain at their raw state while others undergo a firing process, reflecting an ongoing discourse around ephemerality and endurance

Garcia was born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in 1977. She holds a MFA in Ceramics and a Museum Education certificate from the University of North Texas. Garcia has exhibited widely in Texas and beyond, including solo exhibitions at Goldmark Cultural Center and the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, Texas. In 2022, she created the binational solo exhibition La Línea Imaginaria, co-hosted by the Chamizal National Memorial Museum in Juárez, Mexico, and the Museo de Arqueología e Historia in El Paso, Texas. Her works has been featured in group exhibitions at important institutions such as the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft in Houston, Texas, and the Fort Worth Community Arts Center in Fort Worth, Texas. In 2023, she participated in Soy de Tejas: A Statewide Survey of Latinx Art, a group exhibition curated by Rigoberto Luna at the Centro de Artes in San Antonio, Texas, and Land, Body, Earth, curated by by Eliza Au for The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio. Garcia is the recipient of several grants and awards, including the Top Prize at Artspace 111 (2019) and the Nasher Artist Grant (2021). She also received recognition in the Second Latin American Contemporary Fine Art Competition (2019) and from the U.S. Consulate in Mexico (2022). In 2015, she participated in the Ceramics Handbuilding Workshop at La Meridiana in Certaldo, Italy, and has since then attended several artist residencies in the United States and Europe, including International Artists Residency Exchange in St. Raphael, France (2020), the 100W Artist & Writer Residency in Corsicana, Texas (2021) and the F.E.A.R.S residency at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, Colorado (2025). Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Old Jail Art Center in Albany, Texas.

Garcia lives and works in Dallas, Texas.