In celebration of FWADA’s Spring Gallery Night, the Sid Richardson Museum invites you to experience Artist in Process, a unique opportunity to witness art in the making. Local artist Karla García will be working live in our front gallery, offering a rare glimpse into her sculptural practice rooted in clay.

Born in Mexico, Texas-based García draws inspiration from the desert landscapes of the American West and her borderland upbringing. Her signature cactus forms—symbols of resilience, continuity, and cultural heritage—evoke the same arid vistas central to both classic Western art and film, while reframing them through a contemporary lens. García’s work reflects themes of migration, identity, and survival, expanding the narrative of the West beyond Hollywood’s mythology to include the lived experiences of those who call it home.

Her live sculpting takes place alongside our exhibition, The Cinematic West: The Art That Made the Movies, which explores how artists like Frederic Remington and Charles Russell helped shape the imagery of the Western film genre. In this setting, García’s tactile, three-dimensional forms create a vibrant dialogue with the historic paintings, silent film clips, and vintage movie posters on view, inviting visitors to connect the cinematic imagination of the Western frontier with the lived, contemporary landscapes that inspire her work.

Stop by anytime between 1:00–3:00 pm to watch Karla García at work and engage with her creative process.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Karla García

Karla García is a Texas-based artist originally from Mexico whose ceramic sculptural installations draw from desert and prairie ecologies, cultural memory, and philosophical reflections on the natural world. Her work is deeply rooted in her Mexican heritage and informed by personal and ancestral memory, exploring the resilience of humanity through the landscapes we inhabit.

She earned an MFA in Ceramics and a Certificate in Museum Education from the University of North Texas in 2019. García has exhibited widely in Texas and beyond, receiving numerous awards, including the Nasher Artist Grant, the Top Prize at Artspace 111, and recognition from the U.S. Consulate in Mexico for her binational exhibition La Línea Imaginaria. Her work has been featured in Nasher Magazine, Southwest Contemporary, Scalawag Magazine, Glasstire, and NPR’s Morning Edition, among others.

Her practice spans regional and national platforms including a Fellowship at the Sandhills Institute in Nebraska developing a site-specific installation for the Armstrong House Museum. Other presentations include a residency and installation Between the Land and Sky at University of Colorado Springs, Colorado; the Soy the Tejas: A Survey of LatinX Art at the Riverside Museum in the Cheech Center for Chicano Art; and solo exhibitions such as Grass Flower  (2025), at Lora Reynolds Gallery in Austin, Texas, Shifting Ground (2024) at 12.26 Gallery in Dallas, Texas, and the Cell Series: When the Grass Stands Still (2023) at the Old Jail Art Center in Albany, Texas.

No Registration Required 

Ages: all ages

Contact: Director of Adult Programs at adulteducation@SidRichardsonMuseum.org or 817.332.6554 if you have any questions.