Lunch on Fridays: Eric J. García

Spend a lunch hour learning about the latest in art and design during these Friday lectures at the Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA). Each lecture features a variety of artists and designers from around the world, including CIA faculty and visiting artists. This event is free and open to the public. Pizza and beverages will be provided on a first-come, first served basis.

Lunch on Fridays with Eric J. García will take place at 12:15pm Friday, February 9 in CIA’s Peter B. Lewis Theater. Hear García, a multimedia artist and U.S. military veteran, discuss Discharged, a video game that explores the real-life consequences of serving in the military, critiques the glamorized depiction of military combat presented in commercial video games such as Call of Duty, and criticizes the U.S. military’s use of video games to recruit teens from low-income, Latinx households.

García, as part of the warGames Tactical Media Collective, collaborated with The Plug-In Studio (Kerry Richardson + Steve Ciampaglia) to create Discharged. During Lunch on Fridays, he’ll discuss his own enlistment and how that shaped his perspectives of the military and the United States. He’ll also talk about art, gaming, public engagement and, of course, the politics of it all.

Eric J. García uses history and a graphic style to create political art that confronts our understanding of the present. Using printmaking, drawings, murals and multimedia projects that use very specific meaningful materials, he aims to prevent historical amnesia and cultural erasure. By re-examining forgotten stories in an accessible and visually striking way, his work can be a tool with which to share, to learn from and to spark critical dialogue. He received his BFA with a minor in Chicano studies from the University of New Mexico, and earned his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. García is a teaching artist, a member of the Veteran Art Movement, and one of the newest members of the Justseeds Print Cooperative. García has exhibited nationally and can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Library of Congress.