Michael Anthony García: Bored of Necessity: 30 Years of Practicing

September 05, 2026 - October 03, 2026

From the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center: "Bored of Necessity: 30 Years of Practicing marks the first major survey exhibition spanning thirty years of work by interdisciplinary artist Michael Anthony García. Bringing together sculpture, installation, performance, photography, video, and archival materials, the exhibition traces an evolving practice rooted in experimentation, persistence, and an unwavering commitment to making art as a way of understanding the world. The exhibition's title, Bored of Necessity, speaks to the paradox at the center of García's career. Art began as a necessity, a means of survival, self-definition, and questioning, but over decades of repetition, discipline, and relentless making, necessity itself became something to challenge. Rather than settling into certainty, García has consistently reinvented his practice, allowing curiosity, humor, vulnerability, and risk to guide each new body of work. For more than three decades, García has examined identity, mortality, labor, queerness, Latinidad, memory, consumer culture, and the fragile relationship between the body and the objects it leaves behind. Clothing, one of the artist's most recognizable materials, appears throughout the exhibition as both sculpture and surrogate: an absent body carrying the traces of lived experience. Across diverse media, García transforms ordinary materials into poetic investigations of presence and absence, intimacy and spectacle, permanence and decay. Rather than presenting a chronological retrospective, Bored of Necessity invites visitors to discover recurring ideas that have resurfaced, shifted, and matured across thirty years of artistic practice. Early works converse with recent projects, revealing how questions asked decades ago continue to evolve in unexpected ways. Throughout his career, García has resisted the limitations of any single discipline. Performance informs sculpture. Photography documents impermanent actions while becoming independent works of art. Installation creates environments that encourage reflection, participation, and dialogue. The exhibition demonstrates how these mediums intersect to form a practice that is simultaneously personal and deeply engaged with broader social and cultural conversations. This exhibition is sponsored by the City of Austin. About the artist: Michael Anthony Garcia is a queer, interdisciplinary artist from El Paso, who claims both Mexican & US citizenship. His practices focus on photography/ video, sculpture/ installation & performance/ poetry. He completed his Masters of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022 and is a founding member of the Los Outsiders curatorial collective. His work has premiered in the 2011 & 2024 Texas Biennials, The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Experimental Action Performance Festival, The Contemporary Austin, SoundSpace at The Blanton Museum of Art, Fusebox, El Museo de la Ciudad de México, grayDUCK & ThreeWalls in Chicago."

Reception September 05\, 2026 \| 7:00 - 9:00 pm

[The Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center](https://glasstire.com/venues/the-mexican-american-cultural-center/) 600 River Street Austin, TX 78701