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 with a BFA in Studio Arts (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’s work engages with symbol, color, and metaphor as a visual language that investigates and interprets ancient visual culture, cosmology, and decoloniality.
Garcia’s interest in Mesoamerican art developed during early childhood experiences in Mexico and continues to be the primary inspiration in her practice today. Based on Garcia’s study of Nahuatl language and Mesoamerican praxes, she creates works in conversation with pre-Hispanic legacies. Garcia is interested in fostering remembering and ancestral connection, and revisibilizing artistic traditions that were destroyed during colonization and which remain underrecognized in contemporary culture. See more of Garcia’s work on Instagram at @moira.garcia.art