Harold Garcia V (El Quinto)
Bio: Harold Garcia V (El Quinto) (b. 1985, Havana, Cuba) is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in New York whose work examines ecological precarity, colonial legacies, and the politics of landscape, with a particular focus on South Florida’s Everglades. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA in painting from the San Alejandro Fine Arts Academy in Havana, Cuba.
Garcia has been featured in significant institutional exhibitions, including “Water Ways: Indigenous Ecologies and Florida Heritage” at the Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts (2025); “Past as Prologue: A Historical Acknowledgment, Part II” at the National Academy of Design (2025); “Guilt-Ridden Landscape” at the United Nations (2022); and “ARTxiomas” at the OAS AMA Art Museum of the Americas (2016). His solo exhibition, “Welcome to the Everglades” (2021), at the Thomas Nickles Project, was accompanied by the United Nations Documentation and Division Lecture Series.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement:
The project is both a sculptural environment and an operational system that stages the mechanisms regulating access, participation, and belonging. Viewers navigate permissions, checkpoints, and delays, becoming provisional subjects of a bureaucratic apparatus that exposes how cultural assimilation, exclusion, and self-regulation are produced. Their movements generate traces and decisions that are folded back into the work as material and evidence, forming a speculative ethnographic archive from within the very institutional logic the project critiques.
Through a theater stage and network of cameras and screens, invisible operations of control are translated into visible images so that surveillance becomes spectacle and administration becomes choreography that actively shapes behavior. Framed as an ongoing research process grounded in community engagement, participation, and ethical friction, the installation proposes transculturation not as neutral blending but as a contested, procedural process structured by law, infrastructure, visibility, and data, inviting audiences to feel the systems they move through every day.
Harold Garcia V (El Quinto)
Bureaucratic Neologisms of the Self, 2026
Questionnaire, silkscreen print, CRT monitor, CCTV camera, PVC panels, wood, fabric, and caster wheels; live recording
Courtesy of the artist
First Year Exhibition
Harold Garcia V (El Quinto)
The Heron’s Silent Song, 2025
Molasses silkscreen on canvas, oriented strand board (OSB), pool tiles, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), concrete blocks, ratchet straps, caster wheels, pool noodles, metal rods, metal wires, heron taxidermy leg, treated crystalized molasses, rebar, and feathers
Courtesy of the artist