Miki Garcia was appointed the Director of the Arizona State University Art Museum in December 2017. She was previously the Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara from 2005-2017. Prior to this, she worked at the Public Art Fund, N.Y. from 2001 to 2004. From 1999 to 2001 Garcia was a Curatorial Associate at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and has also worked at the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin and the San Antonio Museum of Art. At MCASB, Garcia worked with numerous emerging as well as internationally recognized artists including, Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Sanford Biggers, Michele O’Marah, Mickalene Thomas, Dasha Shishkin, Tam Van Tran, and Mario Ybarra, Jr. She has also completed numerous scholarly and professional publications and has taken part in juries and guest lectures including most recently Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue, Creative Capital, The Santo Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Can you speak to your drive to focus on community well-being and social good?
Too many people think about art museums as entertainment or as an extracurricular pastime that may enrich our quality of life. To be sure art does have a vital role in edification and awe but art museums should also be responsible for beneficial community outcomes — they are places that dictate and influence our common cultural beliefs. They are places to collectively bear witness, to share in how creativity can be an instrument for imagining more just worlds and for building broad empathy and understanding among each other. To this end, our museum takes on institutional accountability to those we serve by committing to exhibitions and programs that address the most pressing issues of our time.
How did the powerful artistic expression of the community-led exhibition, “Twin Flames,” work to bridge divide and create awareness?
In so many ways but I’ll name a few: 1) producing this in partnership with two other entities — the George Floyd Global Memorial and the ASU Center for Work and Democracy — we acted as 3 distinct organizations to collaborate for the various constituents and communities we serve 2) working with a black-led community of practice comprised of activists, elders, children scholars and philanthropists who shaped the exhibition design and programs and 3) enabling a people-powered memorial to take space in art galleries, traditionally reserved for what was once referred to as “high art” and disrupting old genres in favor of celebrating culture that happens everywhere in all places and spaces.
What are you hoping to see change concerning underrepresented artists in museum collections?
Our collections committee is proactively questioning the foundations of art museums and the power structures that uphold them. ASUAM curators and volunteers seek to address whether artists are represented by galleries, whether they have formal training, where privilege exists, and how we, as museums, perpetuate systems of inequity in all forms. We don’t merely want to change the starkly disproportionate data of who is represented in museums (the data is dismaying), but we want to change the philosophies and systems that created these inequities in the first place.
As a teaching museum, how does the museum make it accessible for ASU students to research, learn, and develop their skills in art history, curation, conservation, and as artists?
The role of a university art museum is to be a collaborative, transformative, and learning-driven cultural institution, providing interdisciplinary learning opportunities for lifelong learners from across the university ranging from the sciences, humanities, journalism, sociology, and schools of arts and design. A teaching museum, much like a teaching hospital, is responsible for training the next generation of arts professionals and is the frontrunner in research in art history and museum studies while delivering the highest possible level of artistic standards through collection teaching, exhibition making, research, and audience engagement. ASU faculty integrate the museum’s collections and exhibitions into their curricula, we hire and train student workers called Museum Ambassadors to assist with all aspects of museum operations and we host interns from across the globe.
Why was The Creative Aging and Lifelong Learning (CALL) Program an important initiative for the community?
This series engages with the 55 and better community, with participatory art programming as an opportunity to demonstrate the social and emotional power of art and use art-making as a vital tool in encouraging and facilitating cross-generational collaboration and community building. We were able to launch this program with funds from the E.A. Michelson Philanthropy for the Vitality Arts Project for Art Museums initiative.
What are some aspects of the art world that you pay close attention to?
Having worked in the art world for 25+ years, these days I am most keenly interested in people, places, and production sites that have been marginalized by the mainstream art market. Of course, I go to the international biennials and art fairs, but I am also interested in learning where art in the broadest sense is happening and who does not have access to traditional avenues of success. I recently visited a ceramics taller in Tijuana called Lustre Estudio – they are doing incredible work and they were featured in Hammer’s biennial in 2023. I skipped Frieze LA last year and instead spent time at the Heard Indian Market & Fair and got to see new work by Tyrrell Tapaha, Bobby Dues, and Darby Raymond-Overstreet to name a few.
What do you consider some of the most innovative ideas regarding educating people about the contemporary art world?
That art happens everywhere and value and meaning are usually codified by a small, homogeneous strata of elites. If we can break away from dominant forms of art classification, we can begin to see value and meaning as the most important aspects of art.
What are some of your favorite works or artists in the collection?
A pair of ceramic dogs by David Gilhooly, Max, 1988 and Fifi, 1988; a Carlos Martiel work called Insignia III, 2021 that just entered the collection; a gorgeous Rufino Tamayo, Fumador, 1949 from the Oliver B James Collection that founded the museum and a Fritz Scholder, Portrait of a Massacred Indian, 1973, Lithograph that was recently on view in our exhibition, entitled “Making Visible.”
What has been your favorite exhibition in the last few years that made a profound cultural statement?
ASUAM was one of only a few art museums awarded a grant by the Art For Justice Fund and we were able to successfully produce the traveling exhibition and accompanying publication, “Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration” which considers the foundational roots of confinement from an art historical perspective to better understand the fact that today’s mass incarceration crisis is centuries in the making. “Undoing Time” explored how images throughout time contribute to entrenched cultural beliefs associated with today’s carceral system. The exhibition included 12 never-before-seen commissioned artworks from contemporary artists whose work combines history, research and storytelling in material form: Carolina Aranibar-Fernández, Juan Brenner, Raven Chacon, Sandra de la Loza, Ashley Hunt, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Michael Rohd, Paul Rucker, Xaviera Simmons, Stephanie Syjuco, Vincent Valdez and Mario Ybarra Jr. It was organized by Miki Garcia; Heather Sealy Lineberry, curator emeritus; Matthew Villar Miranda, ASU-LACMA Fellow; and Julio César Morales, senior curator, and traveled to Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives and Contemporary Art Center New Orleans.
What is it like supervising ASU students interested in pursuing a career in the arts?
Because my career has been influenced and supported by mentors and peer colleagues, I am committed to making myself available to students interested in pursuing art careers. I am known to be blunt about the difficulties of working in the nonprofit sector but also inspirational because of my firm belief in the transformative power of art.
What do you like most about your role at the museum?
I love being able to connect audiences with the incredible imagination, minds, and creativity of living artists.
What are your favorite cities to visit to view art?
Oaxaca City; Phoenix; and I’m planning a trip to Cape Town next year