The first thing that hits you about Eric Garcia’s new mural in the Albuquerque Museum, “Since 1776…”, is the sheer size of it.
“I wanted to first play with the architecture,” Garcia said on Thursday during the ceremony devoted to him, his team and the mural itself. “I wanted to do something that no one had done before. I wanted to go bigger.”
Garcia, a Daily Lobo and University of New Mexico alum, opened the exhibition this month as part of the Frederick Hammersley Visiting Artist Program to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the United States of America’s founding.
The mural is chock full of political imagery, invoking events and themes both new and old, along with some who hug the line in between. Garcia is no stranger to political cartoons, as he’s regularly drawn them for decades, but he said his first attempt at satire was during his service in the Air Force, when he made caricatures of he and his peers’ commanding officers.
“Well, my colleagues liked them, my fellow enlisted, but the officers obviously did not,” Garcia told the Daily Lobo.
He eventually left the Air Force and attended UNM through the GI Bill, studying art and Chicano studies, and while there joined the Daily Lobo as a political cartoonist. While in school — and after, while working for a number of publications in town and later attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to earn a master’s degree — Garcia maintained a regular satire column, titled “El Machete Illustrated”, beginning in 2004.
Garcia still contributes to the column on a sporadic basis, and his experience in political cartooning is immediately evident in the content and style of “Since 1776…”. The mural features commentary on everything from data centers to George Washington to the state’s history with nuclear weapons, in an effort, Garcia said, to “give a critical look on what we’re really celebrating here, 250 years later.”
“Maybe it’s a celebration to some, and maybe it’s 250 years of survival for many others,” Garcia said. “So this is a really big thanks to the museum for not being bullied and not being pushed around and being intimidated to have such critical dialog visualized right before your eyes.”
The centerpiece of the mural — besides the large “bald” eagle, complete with an actually hairless head — is Lady Liberty, whose figure stretches across much of the available space on the wall and windows in a corner of the Albuquerque Museum lobby. In one hand, she grasps a chain that is visibly strained connected to a conveniently-labeled “Plymouth Rock”, and in the other, she holds her signature torch while a length of barbed wire dangles from her arm.
Garcia says Lady Liberty’s inclusion is meant to be a parallel of the Greek myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to give to the people of Earth.
“Lady Liberty is this other torch bearer, and her torch is — I would say — starting to be extinguished because of all these new deregulations, all these new unjust laws, all these new encroachments on our liberties,” Garcia said. “And then, if we, in fact, look more specifically within the arts or the museums and the historical cultural centers, like they’re being defunded, they’re being limited, they’re being extinguished.”
Also displayed prominently in the mural is a procession of men, women and children being supervised by a masked officer on horseback as they are led through the open doors of a giant icebox — invoking Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency abbreviated as “ICE” and under fire for actions including those leading to the deaths of two individuals in Minneapolis, Minnesota less than three weeks apart in January.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
The icebox is labeled “Bosque Redondo”, drawing another parallel, this time from how Garcia views immigration enforcement as it’s practiced today in the United States to the federal government’s practice of forcibly transporting thousands of Diné and Ndé people from their homes to the reservation of the same name from 1863-1868, according to the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.
An ICE agent, with a mask and clearly-labeled hat associating him with the agency, is drawn on the reverse side one of the lobby’s columns, the only part of the mural to be fully invisible when entering the lobby, “hiding” from the viewer in a way easily viewed as intentional on the part of Garcia and his team of artists.
Garcia, who also serves as Assistant Professor of Painting & Drawing at UNM, enlisted the help of artist Aaron Richardson, teaching artists from the Albuquerque Museum and artists from the non-profit Working Classroom in Barelas to bring the mural to life, including UNM student Genesis Mullins.
Mullins told the Daily Lobo that before seeing Garcia’s vision for the mural, she expected the project to be “digestible…something cultural or something like that.”
“So when I first started sketching something so political, I was very surprised, but I was also very excited, just because it’s not something you can really see at a museum,” Mullins said at the ceremony on Thursday.
Mullins said she appreciated Garcia’s mention of Bosque Redondo, saying that those events and others mentioned in the mural are “interconnected” across both history and the nation.
“What happens at a global scale happens at a smaller scale first,” Mullins said. “I think stuff like (the inclusion of the ICE agent), little things like that can trigger people, but if you look further than that, the real message comes forward. Like Professor Eric said, ‘America is a place of displacement.’ But I do think that’s necessary. If people complain, people think something’s wrong it means you’re making real change. You’re asking the right questions.”
Elliott Wood is the editor-in-chief of the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at editorinchief@dailylobo.com or on X @elliottinabq
