Alixa Garcia is a multidisciplinary artist. She is cofounder and artistic director of Climbing PoeTree, an activist multimedia theater and spoken-word duo. She is currently working to develop multimedia curricula to help learners understand and further analyze the systems of oppression and resistance. She hopes to creates bonds of critical consciousness and imagination necessary for social change. Much of her activism surrounds the idea of healing inner trauma, exposing injustices, creating hope from apathy and facing the issues that plague our communities. She shows particular passion towards environmental social justice.

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Alixa Garcia

Who's Next: Up in Arms, 2020

Graphite on paper

10 x 44 ft

 

Interactive installation

Warehouse, Geffen Contemporary at MOCA

Who’s Next: Up In Arms is a collective portrait of children killed by guns between December 2012 and December 2013. This was the year gun violence shot up in the United States; it has yet to come back down. Rendered in pencil, the drawing is a perpetual work in progress that will eventually depict the 194 children under the age of twelve killed in that time span.

In order to represent the ongoing crisis of gun violence, Garcia adds onto the piece by live-drawing during its exhibition. What does it feel like to engage and witness a body of work that is still growing when there is no foreseeable end in sight? Inviting us to engage with the children’s absence and presence, 194 pencils are hung throughout, extending the feeling of a shared classroom, and driving a deeper question: What have we come here to learn?

 

Who’s Next: Up In Arms aims at honoring while also forcing us to face the loss of the most innocent among us. This immersive and interactive experience takes the viewer through a number of stages: from meditation to interruption; from darkness to witnessing; from receiving to giving. Bullets have killed roughly 259,687* people since the tragedy in Sandy Hook. 

 

*CDC report February 26, 2020