Tlapalería: Community Color Lab
Mobile Artists in Residence | Autumn 2026
Moira Garcia is a multidisciplinary Chicana artist and educator from Santa Fe whose work explores Indigenous visual culture, memory, and ancestral ways of knowing. During her time as Mobile Artist in Residence, Garcia is developing a Community Color Lab called “Tlapalería” (from the Nahuatl word Tlapalli, which means color). The Art to G.O. Truck will host workshops supporting youth and community members to create New Mexico place-based pigments. Workshops may include foraging for natural pigments, botanical documentation, and field sketching. The culminating aspect will be a field guide of New Mexico natural pigments printed as a zine.
About the Artist
Moira Garcia is a multidisciplinary Chicana 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 a Master’s in Latin American Studies with concentrations in Latin American Art History and Indigenous Studies from the University of New Mexico. Garcia employs image, symbol, and color as a visual language that investigates and interprets ancient visual culture, cosmology, and decoloniality.
Garcia’s interdisciplinary practice is largely informed by her engagement with Mesoamerican art, which has been a primary influence since childhood. Based on her study of Nahuatl language and Mesoamerican praxes, Garcia creates works in conversation with pre-Hispanic legacies. She is interested in fostering ancestral remembering and revisibilizing artistic traditions that were destroyed during colonization and which remain underrecognized in mainstream culture. Garcia partners as an artist and educator with cultural institutions in Santa Fe and abroad, including the Santa Fe Opera, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and the Museum of International Folk Art. She recently participated in a residency with Arquetopia in Puebla, Mexico.
See more of Garcia’s work on Instagram at @moira.garcia.art