Presentation: Monica Kim Garza

After numerous presentations of artists who were trained classically in art and who are now showcasing their art in galleries, I felt like Monica Kim Garza was super relatable because she uses social media as a platform to promote her art and resist the prevalent fatphobia within our society. Now, in the time that we live in, it has become really easy to connect with other artists of color and I really like how Armando Berumen was able to find Kim Garza by word of mouth and social media. It's like, a reflection of how young POC connect with each other now to find community. And now, Armando was able to share his knowledge of an artist resisting fatphobia! I find that super dope...

Toward Kim Garza's work, I find that she resists fatphobia and erasure of fat womxn by painting nude/semi-nude portraits of fat woman in active and sexual positions. For example, surfing, swimming, and hiking, in which she displays women often in groups doing these activities. I feel like she includes multiple women together in her paintings because she shows how women empower each other by being in a collective especially when society continues to bring us down by dividing and conquering us.

In this specific painting that I provided here,  Kim Garza depicts multiple nude women playing basketball while fashioning headbands and the focus of the painting is this badass mujer who's dunking on them backward. I chose this image because I felt like it was dope how she painted multiple women of different skin colors who are unified in a game of basketball, which is a sport that focuses mostly on the big, muscular men in the NBA. I hope to find more artists like Kim Garza on social media in the future.