Artists in Residence

 2025 New Mexico Arts Artist Residency at Los Luceros Historic Site

New Mexico Arts is pleased to announce two fellowships for the 2025 Artist in Residence program at Los Luceros Historic Site. This year’s artists include Jason Garcia (Okuu Pín/Santa Clara Pueblo Tewa), a contemporary clay artist and printmaker, and Chris E. Vargas, a video maker and transdisciplinary artist. The artists will each spend six weeks at Los Luceros, where they will have time and space to develop their creative practice, as well as offer public programs.

 Jason Garcia will hold the first residency on March 7 - April 18, 2025

Using traditional Pueblo pottery techniques coupled with printmaking, Garcia juxtaposes customary and contemporary methods with his Ancestral Tewa cultural knowledge. He plans to spend his time at Los Luceros conducting field visits to Tewa ancestral villages located near the site. He will create concepts and sketches as the basis for clay tiles illustrated with comic book-style narratives as a continuation of a body of work called, “Tewa Tales of Suspense.”

Jason Garcia earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of New Mexico and his Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. His work has been exhibited at museums throughout the country, including the National Museum of the American Indian, Arizona State University, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, among others. He resides and works in Santa Clara Pueblo, NM.

Chris E. Vargas will hold the second residency on April 25 - June 6, 2025

Vargas’ artwork uses humor and performance to explore the complex ways queer and trans people negotiate spaces for themselves within historical and institutional memory. His work at Los Luceros will center on Mary Cabot Wheelwright and her collaboration with two-spirit Diné weaver Hastíín Klah. Their work together highlights an intersection of cultural and gendered autonomy, as well as resistance to erasure, which will inform a speculative film and video project bridging past and present.

Chris E. Vargas earned his Master of Fine Arts from the Art Practice department at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the Executive Director of MOTHA, the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art. He received a Creative Capital award in the Emerging Field category in 2016, a John C. Guggenheim fellowship in 2020, and a Latinx Art Fellowship in 2024-25. He lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Learn more about this program from New Mexico Arts.