River Garza

River Garza is an artist from Los Angeles, CA whose work draws on traditional Indigenous aesthetics, Southern California Indigenous maritime culture, skateboarding, Graffiti, Mexican culture, and Low Rider culture.

"My artistic practice is inseparable from my Tongva heritage. I am an amalgamation of centuries of resistance, forced assimilation, and resettlement and my work reflects those disjointments of memory, tradition, and identity. My practice focuses on how differential treatment under settler governments construct Indigenous identities. I employ physical layers of cultural artifacts in my work, such as oil, spray paint, pen, and Western magazine cutouts which integrate Tongva ancestral iconography and contemporary experiences. My work acts as a critique of settler capitalism while exploring how the literal and metaphoric layers of colonialism add weight to contemporary Indigenous identity that is both painful and a source of creativity. Visual sovereignty is another critical aspect of my practice. Due to my tribe’s lack of access to our traditional land base, visual sovereignty, the act of creating work free of the demands of the Western canon, becomes a crucial site for the practice of tribal sovereignty and for the perpetuation of our collective memory. Through artifacts and artificial physical landscapes, I create sites that are sacred spaces and begin to reclaim Tongva sovereignty and provide an imagined future where my people can exercise their full right as original peoples of this land." - River Garza