Edgar Garcia’s award-winning work cuts a singular and expansive path working across multiple critical and creative modes, including criticism, dramaturgy, poetry, and performance.

By Rivky Mondal

Associate Professor of English Edgar Garcia has been named one of twenty-four recipients of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ prestigious Grants to Artists award. The unrestricted $45,000 prize recognizes experimental work across disciplines including poetry, performance, and visual art. Established in 1963 by John Cage and Jasper Johns, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts has long supported boundary-pushing artists and continues to foreground practices that move fluidly between forms. Garcia’s selection places him within a global cohort of artists working at the forefront of creative innovation, and among a small group of Chicago-based recipients this year.

Garcia’s work—encompassing poetry, criticism, and performance—embodies the cross-disciplinary experimentation the award was invented to champion. A poet and scholar of the literatures and cultures of the Americas, his research examines the relationship between crisis and creativity: how moments of rupture, displacement, and historical loss can also generate new forms of thinking, expression, and collective life. In books such as Emergency: Reading the Popul Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Garcia turns to foundational texts like the K’iche’ Maya Popul Vuh, not as distant artifacts but living frameworks for worlds that are made and remade under pressure.

Garcia performing Zarabanda Variations, in collaboration with Keir GoGwilt. Video Credit: Keir GoGwilt

That approach extends across an unusually wide range of materials and methods. Garcia’s work engages not only literary texts but also pictographic and hieroglyphic writing systems, ritual song traditions, dream practices, and performance. Recent and forthcoming projects such as the poetry collection Cantares and the performance work developed with composer Keir GoGwilt trace what Garcia describes as an “indigenously baroque soundscape of the Americas,” where Indigenous, colonial, and contemporary influences converge. Across these creative forms, Garcia’s practice is guided by a commitment to work with cultural materials as a mode of interpreting them, cultivating what he calls a form of intellectual kinship with the past.

This multimodal, interdisciplinary ethos is tied deeply with the Division of the Arts & Humanities, where faculty regularly move between creative intelligence and critical inquiry. In this environment, artistic production is another way of thinking, one that expands how research can be conducted, shared, and preserved.

In the conversation that follows, Garcia reflects on how his performance practice emerged from his writing; what collaboration has taught him about addressing different audiences; and how the intellectual community at UChicago shapes his evolving work.

What are the origins of this performance, and how has it evolved as you’ve presented to different audiences?

EG: Thanks so much for talking with me about my work. The context for the award is my poetry and critical writings. But the prize from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts has an interesting history in relation to performance. The prize was started by Jasper Johns and John Cage in 1963 to support the work of Merce Cunningham. Among the contributors to the first benefit exhibition were Marcel Duchamp, Willem de Koonig, and Andy Warhol. Since that time, the prize has evolved to include various artistic media such as poetry, dance, theatre, visual arts, music, and sound—all the while maintaining a foundational relation to performance.

My own foray into performance has been a collaboration with Keir GoGwilt of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC), with whom I have reworked poems from my books Skins of Columbus (Fence Books, 2019) and Cantares (Wesleyan University Press, 2026) into a musical performance titled Zarabanda Variations. This work brings together an ensemble of composers, improvisors, and performers in a composition inspired by the indigenous and colonial musical histories of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New Spain, where the tonalities and harmonies of Spanish, pre-Columbian, and Arab music shaped the early Baroque soundscape. I have learned a tremendous amount about the structure of address in my writing in becoming a stage performer with this group. Our work premiered at Lincoln Center in New York City in 2025 and we have performed it at the Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, MA); the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA); and Fordham University (New York, NY). Future performances are planned—the next forthcoming at National Sawdust (New York, NY). An album based on a recording made at Tiny Panther Studies (Brooklyn, NY) is also forthcoming, along with a chapbook co-published by Wesleyan University Press and [NAME] Publications (yes, that’s the name). 

Can you speak to the process of working with a composer and an ensemble as you brought this performance to life, particularly the ways in which this was (or was not) a generative collaboration and dialogue?

EG: These new venues for my creative and critical work have given it new trajectories and considerations of how my research can entwine with audiences beyond the page, bringing it more intimately into the multimodal and multidisciplinary spirit that animated my work to begin with. Sometimes that requires the critically imaginative work of seeing and hearing the work by way of another person’s eyes and ears, to tune into the nuances of the object at hand in an expanded sensorium.   

Relatedly, in 2025 I collaborated as a consultant on a play, The Duck, which was a production of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck that drew on ideas from my book on the Popol Vuh, Emergency. Written by Shonni Enelow, directed by Sebastían Calderón Bentin, and with Una Chaudhuri as Dramaturg, the play ran on the Tisch Drama Stage, NYU, from April 24-May 3, 2025. This creative team brought me to their studios to consult with them and the actors on such ideas in the Popol Vuh as the power emergent in the problems of emergency, the relation of gods and metapersons to humans in scenes of ecological endangerment, the role of performance and acting in the enacting of world creation, the peculiar repetition and recursion of time and action, the way in which its idea of seeing clearly (the Popol Vuh calls itself ilb’al saq or “instrument for seeing clearly”) is seeing double, and how the world of such nonhumans as birds is itself a theatre and staging of these ideas.

I was thrilled to see enacted a core concept that I’ve tried to communicate in every instance that I’ve had to talk about the Popol Vuh—of which there have been many, from elementary schools and a feature in Scholastic Magazine to universities, museums, artist workshops, and even the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington, DC to introduce a gift facsimile of the Popol Vuh from the Newberry Library to the Columbus Memorial Library on behalf of the Permanent Mission of Guatemala to the United States—which is that the Popol Vuh asks its readers to look with it (as an “instrument for seeing”) and not just at it, but indeed to use it to see anew the cultural, social, and environmental worlds that surround us, including in this case Ibsen’s The Wild Duck.

The University of Chicago’s Division of the Arts & Humanities has many faculty whose work lives at the nexus of creative intelligence and critical scholarship. How does this environment influence the way you think about the different modalities of your work?

EG: My colleagues are a source of tremendous inspiration. I could not imagine a more rich and generative ground for my creative and critical projects. Specifically, one thing that I have found intellectually inspiring has been the dedication that we all share to reading each other’s writing. This is a quality quite unique to the University of Chicago: we actually read each other’s work. And it has been transformational for all my projects, critical and creative. And, in turn, I am dedicated to returning that effort for my colleagues here and in other extramural venues. That is, the ethos of close, critical, contextual collaboration that I’ve experienced with my peers at UChicago has me to curate a critical framework for my creative work, and in turn a creative framework for my critical work. For example, there were two other projects that also complicated and expanded my research agenda and its public presentation, which were animated by a UChicago critical-creative spirit but took place elsewhere.

The first of these was the work I did as a project advisor for the full re-install of the permanent collections at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. The full re-install was motivated by the difficult history of the Fine Arts Center, whose founding collection in 1936 and subsequent collecting practices included many culturally sensitive Indigenous materials (sacred objects but also human remains). As social sensibility around such materials became more acute in the later twentieth century, and as the collecting practices of the museum pivoted more strictly fine art (especially contemporary art and art of the American West), the museum was left with a confusing mixture of artifact and art.

I had been prepared for such engagement in a panel discussion that I previously participated in for a consortium of museums in the Netherlands that were thinking through similar problems (Research Center for Material Culture, Troopen Museum, Afrika Museum, Museum Volkenkunde, and Wereld Museum; along with archival visits with students here to the Newberry Library and the Field Museum), but the work of descending into the material archives of the Fine Arts Center, thinking in practical ways with its curatorial teams and with the Chicano and Indigenous scholars and elders they likewise brought on as consultants, and helping to generate applied questions about the politics of archive and design gave me a more palpable sense of the materiality of my own creative and critical work. Amidst all the erasure and attenuation of the archive, so much of what survives has only survived because of the dedication of a few confronting the impossible chanciness of time and circumstance. My creative and critical work is dedicated to amplifying those histories and living cultural legacies.

What does the “indigenously baroque soundscape of the Americas” mean in the context of your research and creative practice: how do you conceive of its historical and aesthetic origins, and futures?

EG: This is a complicated question. I have two new books (one now out and the other in final stages of completion) that address it from different angles: Cantares and Caravaggio’s Americas. On the one hand, indigeneity is a colonial formation, I argue; but, on the other hand, coloniality is itself an indigenous phenomenon, especially with regard to what comes to be called the baroque. That intertwinement has been the deepest source of my thinking in the past years. And it plays out in the poetics, aesthetics, and cultural politics of the Americas. Because my work strives to conceptualize these poetics across indigenous, colonial, Hispanic, mestizo and contemporary contexts, it requires that I confront the shared intersections of catastrophe, confusion, and erasure in those worlds. And I have tried to do so with a generosity of spirit to match the encompassing spirit that my intellectual forebears of the Americas have brought to these instances of radical crisis. That endeavor requires a multi-modal approach, if only simply because so many disciplinary, composite formations are needed to compose worlds lost or attenuated by much historical loss and erasure. I have tried to bring together approaches from poetry and poetics, art history, archeology, anthropology, myth studies, linguistics, and performance studies to show the fullness of life that I see in those worlds. A soundscape—the rhythm of a world—is built out of such diverse elements, involving the creative, critical, historical, and aesthetic. My future goals are to continue to listen for and develop these rhythms and vital resonances.

Learn more about Garcia’s newly released Cantares collection here.