Tarik Garrett

Tarik Garrett is an artist working between Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA. His artwork and his research are rooted in African diasporic cultural traditions in the Americas. Garrett works in sculpture, photography, video, printmaking, and audio, with a particular interest in embodied knowing. His dissertation examines black collective artistic practices in Los Angeles from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, tracing their emergence and development in the periods leading up to and following the 1965 Watts Rebellion. In this study, sociality is the medium through which embodied thought and knowing are shared, and the Black Radical Tradition is inherited. The wager is that if this infrastructure, built by black sociality, provides a way for radicality to persist, then studying these collectives helps us understand these practices not only at the level of event or image, but at the level of the durable arrangements that sustain black life. Garrett holds an MFA in Studio Art from UC Irvine (2021) and a BFA from Cooper Union (2013).

Film in Progress:

Performing on The Edge of History and Memory with Beverly Buchanan is a journey across the US state of Georgia searching for traces the artist Beverly Buchanan has left behind through her sculptural work and interest in “vernacular architecture.” The film takes an interdisciplinary approach, blending forms of nonfiction, experimental, and ethnographic filmmaking with theoretical concerns of contact, projection, and subaltern cosmology to track the ghostly presence of Buchanan and the communities and histories that she orientates us to connect with by way of her engagement with the landscape.