“My practice is a continuum of ancestral remembering—of what ceases to be dismembered, buried, and forgotten,” says New Mexican-Chicana artist Moira Garcia. By recreating aesthetic qualities, materials, design, and iconographies rooted in pre-Hispanic Mexican legacies and Nahuatl language, Garcia seeks to reexpose artistic traditions that were destroyed during colonization and which remain largely unrecognized in contemporary culture.

Garcia is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and native of New Mexico. She holds a BFA in Studio Arts with a focus in Printmaking from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and an MA in Latin American Studies with concentrations in Art History and Indigenous Studies from the University of New Mexico. Her academic background forms a strong foundation for her artistic practice, enriching her visual ability with a wealth of linguistic and historical knowledge. Her work is a visible language of symbol, color, and metaphor that references and interprets ancient visual culture and cosmologies, tracing paths of connection with the present day.

Her upcoming show at Hecho a Mano is inspired by the idea of Xochiyotl—a Nahuatl word meaning “the essence or being of flowers.” It’s a theme she’s been fascinated with for years, which she began to explore through her work in 2019 and 2020 “to ritualize what I was transcending in my personal life,” Garcia says, adding that “during Covid, the paintings took on a more universal relevance.” Xochiyotl : Florescence showcases a body of work that explores floral metaphors rooted in Mesoamerican culture, where flowers can be wrought as symbols for art, creative expression, preciousness, vitality, death and transformation. The works explore floral imagery in relationship to the four elements—fire, earth, air, and water—which, in Garcia's expression, are depicted by the flowering of hearts, bones, knives, and tears.

Garcia’s work has always been deeply influenced by Mesoamerican art and cosmology, a fascination that developed during her early childhood experiences in Mexico and continues to inspire her artistic practice to this day. She creates works that are in conversation with pre-Hispanic legacies from her base of knowledge of Nahuatl language and Mesoamerican artistic praxes. Her work invites audiences to interrogate their own relationships to land and culture through the lens of pre-Hispanic visual traditions and symbologies, connecting us with ancestral ways of knowing and understanding land, relationship, time and change.

Garcia creates from a variety of materials and methods to produce multilayered narratives that connect ancestral imagery with the contemporary world. While her creations often center on printmaking and mixed media works on paper, Xochiyotl : Florescence will be her first show working in acrylic on canvas. Also on display will be new and older works on paper.

For Garcia, these works “are a portrayal of personal and collective flowering, not in the romantic sense, but through the power of growth and transformation.” Through the act of creating them, she has come to understand xochiyotl as a metaphor for humanity’s constant state of becoming and potential for metamorphosis. On a grand scale, Garcia says, “I think we are at a metamorphic moment right now with change happening all around and inside of us, like flowers bursting to bloom.”

Xochiyotl : Florescence will open at Hecho a Mano on Friday, February 6 and will be on view until March 1.