By Joseph Futtner

Whatever the final design for the Universal City Station Metro stop, Margaret Garcia, the artist collaborating on the project, feels it should include “high-keyed color and light.” These are crucial elements in her painting, especially in the portrait images for which she is best known. Her palette reflects an interest both in the bright colors of popular Latino art and the expressionist color of the early modernist Jawlensky (also a portraitist). She feels fortunate to have been teamed with an architect –Kate Diamond of Siegel, Diamond Architects — who is sympathetic with the artist’s ideas. “I feel really lucky with her,” Garcia continues, “I could have been stuck with a ‘pastel’ architect.” (For more on the MTA’s Art for Rail Transit, see the September issue of NoHo Magazine.)

Garcia hasn’t always been so lucky. A native Angeleno in her forties, she characterizes as “the worst part of my life” a long and acrimonious custody fight with her former husband that precipitated a three-year removal to Chicago. During this period Garcia found work as an art and antiques conservator, which she credits with reenforcing her interest in Classical and academic art. It was also during this period that she began working on a series called “Wild Bitches,” a Fauve-flavored metaphoric rendering of frenzied, primal dogs. The series reflected both Garcia’s
psychological embitterment and her determination to “find an inner strength” in the “resourcefulness of survival.”

Only after this period did Garcia come to adopt identifiable Chicano symbolism, and then with some trepidation. “I started doing the chili peppers,” she recounts, noting that she is ever “trying to avoid the cliché.”

Most of Garcia’s portrait subjects are depicted frontally, tightly framed, often cropped at the top of the head or at the chin, and rendered in the heightened palette that is the artist’s signature. The frontal view is sometimes interpreted as an “aggressive” representational strategy, one that excludes the viewer’s access to the psychology of the sitter. Garcia does not agree. Instead, she sees these images as informal and telling, the visual equivalent of a dialogue with the subject. They are, according to Garcia, “all about the moment, the conversation.” Such a portrait sitting demands a commitment from both subject and artist, a state the artist admits not all find comfortable. “I live my life with cancelled [portrait sit-tings],” Garcia wryly notes.

While each portrait may be appreciated independently, together they consti-tute an image of a community that Garcia believes expresses the best hope for a renewed Los Angeles. (A gridded series of 16 portraits, to be included in a soon-to-open exhibition in Mexico City, is entitled El Nuevo Alestizaje.) The serial ordering is critical to an understanding of this social conception; the colors and contrasts that make up the series define the whole. If each portrait represents a conversation (to use Garcia’s metaphor), then this grouping is the voice of the people, a social discourse redolent with individual personality, mistrust and anger, collective hope, and shared dreams. In short, this is the discourse of a new, vital urban reality.

Landscape — or, more properly, urbanscape — is another subject toward which Garcia has directed her efforts. This aspect of her work — she calls it “looking for magic places” — invariably includes a hu-man presence, often a solitary figure. She is interested for the most part in night scenes, perhaps because the unnatural lighting of the street evokes a responsive color chord. It is an unfortunate fact of urban life, however, that she must experience her subjects indirectly, through photographic studies. “I can’t be there late at night,” laments Garcia.

Recognizing that the city can resist the artist in this fundamental, potentially violent way, Margaret Garcia nevertheless holds out a tremendous hope for Los Angeles. “[The portrait series] reflects the love I have for people and for this city,” Garcia writes. The artist’s commitment to public and social works of art is longstanding and deeply felt. Her experience in the arts extends beyond her own creative endeavors, including the roles of curator (“I brought the Day of the Dead to the L A. Photo Center”) and role-model and educator (Garcia works with young artists at the Ramona Gardens mural project).

Besides the formal issues of light, color, and material, Garcia sees the station project in terms of two powerful metaphors: the Cave and the Passageway. The first of these, the Cave, is at once obvious and complex. Suggested by an early design motif incorporating a canopied entrance with a steep elevator, the image of the cavernous, foreboding subway station is answered by the equally potent, benignant association of the cave with the womb. “I don’t want anything vast, dark or dank,” Garcia insists. The ambiguity suggested by these contrasts amounts to an archetypal narrative: the rider is swallowed up, in order to be delivered.

The image of the Passageway is likewise rewarding in its archetypal and narrative associations. The location for the Universal City Station (at least as of this writing) is the Campo de Cahuenga, the site of the signing of an historical treaty guaranteeing safe passage. The history is important, Garcia feels. “It’s clear that more attention is being paid to the indigenous history.” Moreover, “safe passage” is an important concern of today’s subway rider. Garcia the artist sees the issue for its broadest implications. “Nothing is a coincidence,” she says, commenting on the aptness of the site to the projected transit function. “We all have a purpose here. This is a small passage, part of a larger passage in life.” Life, passage, community renewal — all are answered by the paired images of Cave and Passageway.

Garcia looks forward to the November opening of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City (Arte del Otro Mexico) that includes her work. She continues to develop her ideas for the project. She is particularly excited by the possibility of working her portraits in other, more durable media, including “ceramic tile and Venetian glass mosaic.” Our best hope is that Margaret Garcia’s vision of hope, diversity, and community will be translated to the Universal City Station.