week 8 - monica kim garza

From this week’s presentations, I was particularly drawn to the work of Monica Kim Garza. At first glance, her paintings reminded me of Paul Gauguin. Gauguin was a French post-Impressionist painter from the late 1800s. When his career started to suffer in the 1890s, he decided to travel to Tahiti to revive his muse. His Tahiti trips were essentially a get-rich-quick-scheme. He made paintings of the natives in an effort to sell the idea of Tahiti as a primitive, erotic Garden of Eden-type paradise to the elites back in France. He made it seem like all the natives ever did in Tahiti was lay around, sing, dance, and make love. Garza’s work, on the other hand, is a thousand times more interesting than Gauguin’s could ever be. For one, she is not a white man coming into a foreign land and commodifying the bodies of the native people who live there. Whereas Gauguin painted nude brown women to make a profit, Garza’s work celebrates women of color and their bodies. The women in Garza’s paintings are unapologetically themselves. They’re nude and carefree, running around doing whatever they please. They don’t exist for the sole purpose of being consumed or gazed upon. The vibrant colors and loose brushwork create a fantastical setting for these magical beings to explore. I love how Garza represents contemporary women and their lives within the context of art historical motifs/settings—she truly is taking back the female form from the colonialized male gaze. 

Monica Kim Garza

Paul Gauguin