Q&A with Deborah Garcia, 2026-2027 Guest Curator
The Latinx Project is thrilled to announce the selection of Deborah Garcia as the winner of the Curatorial Open Call for the 2026-27 academic year. In this interview, meet the curator and learn more about their practice as they prepare for their exhibition opening in spring 2027.
TLP: First off, congratulations on being the winner of our latest Curatorial Open Call. Can you share a bit about your most recent curatorial involvements?
I am an architectural designer, curator, and educator- and currently the Residency Director at the Institute for Public Architecture where I manage one of the only architecture-focused art and design live-in residency programs in the United States. My overall practice focuses on redefining our interaction with everyday spaces to reshape and transform the economic, cultural and narrative frameworks that surround them. My research as a spatial explorer has taken me across the globe, examining the interplay between auditory experience, communal narratives, and systemic feedback loops. I am interested in the crossed wires of what we hear, the stories we are a part of, and the things we feedback into the system. I use sonic activation and interaction as a primary tool for considering those relationships.
My focus on curation comes at a moment in my practice in which the design of platforms and infrastructures for public interaction has become the primary focus of my work. In the past five years my work has focused specifically on the production, both individually and collaboratively, of spatial infrastructures for public gathering- and most importantly, listening together. I consider these projects to be curatorial to the extent that they are tools for amplification, often for the work of sound artists but in the past have amplified the voices of other people, bodies, buildings, animals, materials, and beyond. In 2021 at MIT I developed the project, RECORDAR, that centered around the development of a multi-channel recording and broadcasting system scaled to the dimensions of a theatrical 9-foot sound tower, a vessel for a series of live performances— past, present, and future. In 2023 I had the opportunity to produce my most community-focused work at the Harvard Artlab and commissioned by Harvard Loeb Fellow Joseph Zeal-Henry. Built at a human-scale, SUPA SYSTEM asks what music and sound can tell us about how we occupy space with and through sound-making. Since its making the project has been the platform for performances, film screenings and live filmings, it has hosted DJ’s, singers, dancers, and community organizers. Of all my projects thus far, this project opened the floodgates towards a desire to produce collaborative infrastructure and platforms for artists to amplify, stage, and unravel their work.
Since 2024, as the Residency Director at the Institute for Public Architecture, my role is one that takes on the managing of an interdisciplinary residency program while also directing and curating the programming that occurs at the IPA’s Block House on Governors Island located in a public park. In taking on this position I have faced some of the critical questions that currently exist in a lot of architecture and art exhibition spaces —what is public art today? Who is public space for? And most importantly, when it fails (as we currently witness a moment of infrastructural and legislative collapse) what opportunities can we find in its cracks and deficits?
TLP: Tell us about your forthcoming exhibition with TLP. What do you want people to take away from it?
The exhibition will prototype an experimental infrastructure to present a multi-media exhibition exploring the intersections, and often hybridizations, between domestic and public space that are abundant within Latinx culture. From lowriders to backyard sound systems to the multi-use transformation of community salones - these interventions are resourceful customizations of space often at the vulnerable crossroads of legislative, municipal, urban, and architectural power structures. This curatorial prompt invites us to speculate on interventions in public space that at once tread between communal joy and transgression: wonderous stealthy fly as hell spatial delinquencies.
With this exhibition, I will bring together the work of a variety of artists and makers whose practices intersect with space, materiality, and modality through a particular disposition of resistance, cunning, and craft. This attitude of rasquachismo, a sensibility that operates particularly joyously because it flirts with scarcity and hones abundance from limitation and the unknown rather than avoiding it, is precisely what will lie at the heart of this exhibition: a desire to walk away with a sense that the best things happen in the fissures of systems, expectations, and rules.
TLP: What inspires your overall practice as an independent curator, artist, and museum advocate?
In 2025, in the aftermath of an election that brings forth a governmental reality within which Latino/Latinx communities are especially vulnerable and targeted, the need to imagine and represent Latinx bodies and culture in powerful and celebratory ways is more important than ever. In this moment which, as Jamelia Morgan writes “...the use of criminal laws to regulate access to, and behaviors in, public spaces reinforces both existing status hierarchies and contributes to ongoing criminalization of historically and currently marginalized groups”, the power of artistic and spatial intervention is to render alternate realities possible. I am continuously drawn to practices that aim to explore these other realities - who quite literally set out to make them, materially and aesthetically.
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About Deborah Garcia
Deborah Garcia is a spatial activator and curator specializing in sonic and structural disruption. She currently teaches at the Yale School of Architecture and is Residency Director of the Institute for Public Architecture in New York.
About the Latinx Project at NYU
The Latinx Project at New York University explores and promotes U.S. Latinx Art, Culture and Scholarship through creative and interdisciplinary programs. Founded in 2018, it serves as a platform to foster critical public programming and for hosting artists and scholars. The Latinx Project is especially committed to examining and highlighting the multitude of Latinx identities as central to developing a more inclusive and equitable vision of Latinx Studies.
Supporters
The 2026-27 Curatorial Open Call is made possible with support from the Mellon Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.