Maru Garcia 

The artist Maru Garcia founded Prospering backyards (Pb) in collaboration with Self Help Graphics and Art and the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum as a part of her examination of the catastrophic lead contamination by the Exide Battery Plant in SouthEast Los Angeles and surrounding neighborhoods, one of the most costly environmental cleanups in history.  Recognizing the failures of the government to remediate the contamination to date, Garcia partnered with the Museum’s Mineral Science Department to pursue soil testing and lead reduction studies using the mineral Zeolite, which captures and encapsulates lead, thus reducing lead levels in the soil. The Community Science department at NHM worked with Pb and the community scientists to install test sites at their homes to conduct a year-long research project demonstrating zeolites as an alternative lead reduction and a critical tool to mitigate the risk of living within the Exide-affected area.  

Artist Biography

Maru Garcia’s methodology combines laboratory and fieldwork tools from her background in plant chemistry and the pharmaceutical industry. Her media use includes research, installations, performance, sculpture, and video, usually including organic matter to help understand the biological processes occurring in complex systems. Her areas of interest are biosystems, multispecies relations, and the capacity of living organisms (including humans) to act as remediators in contaminated sites. Her work highlights the importance of eco-aesthetics, in which relations are proposed as ways of building cultures of regeneration. At the same time, she questions the ways science and technology have influenced humans more than humans within the natural world.

Maru has participated in conferences and solo and group exhibitions in North America, Europe, and Asia. She was an artist in residence at the National Center of Genetic Resources in Mexico and has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts ‘Anonymous Was a Woman Environmental Art Grant,’ the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) Environmental Justice Grant, the California Arts Council, Los Angeles Sustainability Collaborative, Clifton Webb Scholarship for the Arts, and Fundación Jumex. She collaborated with the Art-Sci Center and Counterforce Lab at UCLA and was a 2020- 2021 Sci-Art Ambassador for Supercollider. She worked at the Getty Research Institute in the 2019-2020 Scholar program titled “Art and Ecology” and was a 2021-2022 artist in residence at 18th Street Arts Center. Maru holds an MFA in Design & Media Arts from UCLA, an MS in Biotechnology, and a BS in Chemistry from Tecnológico de Monterrey, México.