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Rebeca Garcia-Gonzalez
Rebeca Garcia-Gonzalez is an award-winning visual artist and long-term resident of Richmond, CA.
Her interest in the visual arts began early, at a magnet school for the arts and the Art Students League of San Juan. She earned a BFA at the University of Puerto Rico, where she studied printmaking and painted murals. Rebeca came to the Bay Area to pursue a graduate degree in fine art at the San Francisco Art Institute, but instead studied graphic design at the Academy of Art. After a ten-year hiatus, she returned to art as a full-time working artist.
While Rebeca’s painting is best-known through her public art and her portraits of undocumented immigrants, her landscapes of the East Bay have earned awards and are part of many private collections.
A solo show featured portraits of post-Maria Puerto Ricans, completed during a six-week trip to the island and financed via a Kickstarter campaign. She is currently working on a portrait series of Richmond activists.
Rebeca’s murals can be found all around Richmond, where she has painted with local youth in collaboration with several non-profits. Some have social justice themes, others respond to the needs of the community. She has been commissioned by Caltrans, Friends of the Richmond Greenway, the Richmond Police Activities League, the Watershed Project, the East Bay Community Foundation, and Blue Shield for the Richmond Art Center. She is part of the team currently restoring two of John Wehrle’s Richmond murals for Caltrans. Rebe ... view more »
MORE ABOUT THE ARTIST
Artist Statement
Please provide a brief description of your creative process, motivations, and inspirations:
My work explores the intersection of place, identity, and social justice through representational painting. Working primarily in portraiture, landscape, and public art, I seek to document the people and communities that have shaped my experience as a Puerto Rican artist living in California. Whether painting a neighborhood, a community activist, or a local landscape, I am interested in revealing the dignity, resilience, and humanity often overlooked in everyday life. Rooted in observation and realism, my paintings celebrate the beauty of ordinary places while engaging with larger conversations about immigration, belonging, cultural memory, and collective responsibility. Through both studio practice and collaborative public art, I hope to create work that is accessible, thoughtful, and grounded in a genuine connection to community.
As a young person growing up in Puerto Rico I was most influenced by the figurative painting and social issue themes of Puerto Rican painters like Francisco Oller and Rafael Tufiño, and the Farm Security Administration photographs of Jack and Irene Delano. In art school I loved everything figurative, inspired by Joaquín Sorolla and Alice Neel’s work.
I did not train as a painter but as a printmaker. Many Puerto Rican artists are political, and I had some of them as instructors at the Art Students League of San Juan. My interest in realism and figurative work comes from the drawing I did at the University of Puerto Rico under Luisa Géigel and Susana Herrero.
My first (political) mural was done in college during a student strike. It wasn’t until I moved to California to pursue an MFA that I began painting outdoors. After a period of time spent teaching and working other jobs, I became a working artist. As a member of the Puerto Rican Diáspora, I have been able to engage not just Puerto Ricans but Latinos living in the Eastern part of the Bay Area.
I painted from life until the pandemic, because time limits forced me to work fluidly and focus on essentials to complete portraits in the 4-5 hours I could afford. I now work from references and spend more time integrating the way the subjects want to be seen into the painting. “Salma” is part of a series on activists of Richmond, CA.
In this short time, I have realized that public art offers me a chance to connect with a community in a fresh, direct way while creating meaningful work around themes such as local activism, ecology, Black Lives Matters and workers’ rights. I work in a few different styles incorporating elements of contemporary design that range from flat areas of color to full renderings, and almost always use saturated color harmonies. I don’t use aerosols, but use brushes to apply acrylic paint to various surfaces (canvas, wood, cement, stucco walls). I enjoy multidisciplinary collaborations with other artists and the yuxtaposition of disparate elements that may create new meanings.
