In this resonant episode of What’s My Thesis?, artist and educator Kim Garcia joins host Javier Proenza for a layered conversation about memory, community, and the personal and political frameworks that shape diasporic identity. Garcia, whose practice spans sculpture, drawing, and community-based collaboration, reflects on her evolving relationship to artmaking—from early experiments in artist-run residencies to recent work that channels intergenerational trauma, familial mythology, and the slow grief of dementia.

Raised in San Diego and based in Los Angeles, Garcia traces her trajectory through California’s UC system, from UCSD to a transformative MFA at UC Irvine. Her sculptural installations—once flamboyant and cartoonish in scale—have given way to more introspective, materially restrained works, driven by the shifting health of her aging parents. A recent series based on her mother’s ever-changing retellings of ancestral folklore evolves into a meditation on storytelling as a haze: unstable, affective, and resistant to conquest. In new work, she confronts her father's long-term cognitive decline following a near-death experience, positioning art as a form of both documentation and private processing.

The conversation moves fluidly through Garcia’s participation in Gallery After Hours (a collaborative curatorial experiment with Amy MacKay), reflections on her return to the Philippines after 24 years, and the psychic legacies of Spanish and American imperialism embedded in Filipino identity. Garcia speaks candidly about her family’s pursuit of Spanish ancestry as a means of aspirational assimilation and the radical shift in consciousness that comes from recontextualizing that lineage within histories of violence and extraction.

With poetic clarity and humility, Garcia frames her work as a refusal of mastery—an intuitive archive that honors contradiction, transformation, and the limits of language. This is an episode about the power of not knowing, and about what it means to hold grief, resistance, and joy in the same gesture.

Topics Covered:

• Intergenerational storytelling and trauma
• Dementia, caregiving, and creative mourning
• Artist-run initiatives and sustainable curation
• Colonial identity in the Filipino diaspora
• Sculpture as performance and interdependency
• The political stakes of abstraction and refusal

Featured Projects and Mentions:

• Gallery After Hours, co-run with Amy MacKay
• Current group exhibition, The Endless Forever at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
• Upcoming two-person show at DMST Atelier with artist Frannie Hemmelgarn (October 4)
• Ten-year anniversary celebration with Amy MacKay (July 19)

Follow Kim Garcia: 📸 Instagram: @kimwantscoffee

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In this episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza is joined by artist Lauren Goldenberg Longoria for a conversation that traverses personal memory, studio practice, and the tender labor of transformation. Known for her materially rich works that fuse paper, performance, and poetic intuition, Goldenberg Longoria speaks candidly about the healing logic of her process—and the quiet revolutions that can occur through repetition, care, and tactility.

Trained in traditional printmaking and now immersed in the world of handmade paper, Goldenberg Longoria discusses how she builds meaning through destruction—tearing and pulping paper from past works, using the remnants to seed new ones. Her practice becomes a kind of emotional composting: nothing is discarded, everything is metabolized. Whether she’s embedding hair into a fresh sheet of paper or excavating the boundaries between sculpture and drawing, her work investigates how memory and material collapse into one another.

Throughout the episode, Goldenberg Longoria shares stories of childhood, loss, and creative perseverance, always returning to the primacy of the hand. From squishing “gross things” as a kid to the meditative choreography of the studio, she makes a compelling case for process as a form of knowing—and for art as a space where grief can be held, rather than solved.

This episode offers a rare look at how artists turn vulnerability into methodology, and how even the most fragile materials can carry a resilient kind of weight.

— 🔗 Follow Lauren Goldenberg Longoria: @laurengoldenberglongoria 🎧 Listen on all platforms: whatsmythesis.com 🎥 Watch on YouTube: youtube.com/@whatsmythesis ❤️ Support on Patreon: patreon.com/whatsmythesis

#HandmadePaper #ContemporaryArt #LaurenGoldenbergLongoria #WhatsMyThesis #MaterialityInArt #ArtAndGrief #PaperArt #ProcessBasedArt #EmotionalLabor #TactileArt

In this candid and moving conversation, host Javier Proenza sits down with Los Angeles-based artist Dena Novak, whose sculptural paintings and ceramics challenge the rigid codes of minimalism through what she calls “aggressive feminism.” Drawing from a rich personal archive of experience—one shaped by Orthodox Judaism, motherhood, neurodivergence, and trauma—Novak’s work reimagines historically male-dominated art historical tropes with unapologetic sensuality and material intensity.

A recent recipient of the Simon Gad Foundation Award and an MFA candidate at Otis College of Art and Design, Novak shares how a life-altering diagnosis of autism at age 50 reshaped her understanding of herself, her past, and her artistic practice. Her tactile impasto paintings, often described as “candy-colored” and “irresistibly edible,” subvert the pristine aesthetic of artists like John McCracken, replacing “fetish finish” with riotous layers of piped oil paint. As she explains, “The first response people say when they see my work is, ‘I want to touch it. I want to smell it. I want to eat it.’”

The conversation traces Novak’s evolution from a punk activist in Chicago to a ceramicist “boxing with Pollock,” and unpacks her years spent in Orthodox communities in Israel and Los Angeles, where gendered restrictions collided with a creative urgency that could not be contained. Today, her practice is a full-throated reclamation of space—for herself, for disabled artists, and for queer, neurodivergent joy.

Upcoming exhibitions include her MFA thesis show at Otis College (September 2025) and a group exhibition will support the Simon Gad Foundation’s work with disabled artists.

Explore more: 🖼 Shrine NYC – @shrine.nyc 🎓 Otis College of Art and Design – www.otis.edu