Artist Clover Brings Green Space to the 'Crossroads of Life' in South LA
By Jacqueline Aguirre
Trenely “Clover” Garcia is an artist born and raised in LA whose work is deeply rooted in community building and teaching. Clover has worked as a teaching artist at Self Help Graphics, Art Division, and most recently Justice for my Sister.
Los Caminos de la Vida is a serigraph print created in 2018 exploring the possibility of South Central, Los Angeles with an abundance of green space. The print depicts a busy cross street in LA with the everyday bustling cityscape; including cars, the LA Metro line, and the liquor stores that can be found all over the city. All of these common sights with an addition of greenery and places to sit. The background of the print shows a rainy, industrial Downtown Los Angeles. The foreground has two Olmec faces growing out of the ground beneath surrounded by nopales, representing people’s inherent connection with nature and the struggle of displacement. I had the pleasure of speaking with Clover about her print.
Q: Can you introduce yourself a bit before we start?
A: My artist name is Clover. I was born and raised in South Central. I started making art- I wanna say like everyone, doodling in elementary school and doing posters for protests and stencils for patches in high school. Very DIY. We didn't even know there was a silk screening process. But right after high school, I got into the silkscreening class at LA Trade Tech. I also went to Art Division and Self Help. I started my teaching jobs in those two spaces.
Q: Is that silk screen your main medium?
A: Yes and no. It depends on the flow. Sometimes I find myself not painting that much and doing silk screens depending on what my work is. It's a balance– silkscreening and painting. But, I feel like I do more workshops than I do silkscreening. It's mainly just painting.
I have a couple pieces that I’m currently working on. I’m also part of Ni Santas, an art collective that prioritizes brown women.
Q: What did Ni Santas come from?
A: We started in 2016. It was Andi [Xoch] and a friend who had the initial idea for the meetup. They already knew each other. I knew them for their luna rides that I would go to. I immediately fell in love with what they were doing and just being with them. It was the first time I saw that sisterhood outside of my friends. Growing up with the friends that I bonded with, we would just drink and smoke and go to shows— bonding in that way. But with these girls I felt we could just hang out and be creative with each other. What I loved was that they never forced you to be creative. If you even just needed a place to be, you can just come hang out.
We would put out flyers to invite people. At one point, there was a core collective of 13 girls coming from all over the city. We never felt like we had to be tied to the east side. That's how we started off. We continued to have the monthly free workshops, inviting other artists to come in and lead the workshops too. We had a grant that allowed us to pay people coming in. Joan [Zeta] made sure we were able to sustain ourselves with that grant.
Q: Is that the space that helped you grow the most as an artist?
A: I would say yeah. Self Help too. Going there with Ni Santas, we would spend a lot of time there because we would meet twice a week. I'd heard about SHG when I was in high school but crossing the bridge was hard for me at the time. Eventually I slowly started working with Self Help too.
Q: Can you talk a bit about how your artwork Los Caminos de la Vida came about?
A: That intersection that I chose- I grew up on 33rd by Morgan and Long Beach. I would take the Metro train to go to school everyday. I would walk that all the time. I remember walking by the South Central Farm with my grandma when I was six or seven, and now looking at it today, it's not there. This building is all brick and looks like a prison. I saw the transformation of fighting for this giant green space we had in this urban area.
I like nature, I would much rather be in the forest but I think it was like that Utopia. If I could change it, I would have it this way.
Q: Can you talk about the images in the piece?
A: I feel like it shows overall how I feel about the past and present. My introduction to art was graffiti. I would see it all the time. I wanna say I'm into trains because I grew up next to the train track. The majority of the things I do include some type of Metro transportation.
My dads family is from Oaxaca so I love the Olmec heads. They’re a representation of Indigenous people or people that look like that. Everyone I would see on screen growing up was light skinned- small features and I noticed that when I was really young. That’s still something that happens today. Artists who are aware of things like this still do it because it sells. So I like to make an effort to paint real humans in my work. It's not healthy for us growing up and seeing that and expecting that to be beauty and not us. I wanted them looking kinda tristona but kinda not. Like I’m not gonna fake a smile but I’m also not gonna feel pity.
I always like to draw flowers and mushroom caps just because I do feel like that's medicine we should all tap into and look within ourselves and look into medicines.
Q: What is the importance of depicting this vision of what South Central could be?
A: I feel like voicing my opinions– not everyone wants high rise buildings or glamorous things. There’s a lot of us that want nature. Or even just somewhere to sit when you’re walking home without there just being broken bottles all over the ground. We still want green spaces. We don’t need to be in Pasadena to have nice parks.
Q: How has growing up with a lack of green space affected you personally?
A: Just realizing the class differences and what the city chooses to spend money on and why some areas are prioritized over others. I feel like I have built resentment towards the way things are spent. As I was growing up I started noticing that I had to get out of some areas to have nice things.
If I have a project and I have to include a background, I usually include mountains or green (spaces). I don't want to just focus on city life. I want to inspire that greenery or stepping outside of the city and really listen to yourself. I feel like I struggle with even leaving this area because I love nature but I also love being from this area and the attachment to the memories I have here. We wanna hold on to our neighborhoods.
It's not simple because developers move pretty fast. The house I grew up in, we had to move out because the owner sold it to a big corporation. Everytime we would bid on a house in South Central, there was this big developer who would always win the bids and create all these apartments that look the same. She had to move to Huntington Park but she never wanted to move past Slauson. She would say anything past Slauson is too far because that's where her life was. Even me, when I moved, I would still go to South Central to go buy groceries because that's what was familiar to me.
Q: Has working with youth influenced these topics in your work?
A: Yeah, I realized that years ago. They look up to you as an adult when you work with them. I want to influence them in a good way. I tell them “Hey don't you wanna go visit some trees?”. I want them to find peace and not try to be all fast moving in the city. Also, I’ve seen more little kids draw like plants and I want them to pay more attention to where that's coming from.
Growing up, my friends and I always had a problem [with drinking]. I really think that that’s another form of oppression. For the longest time, that's how they have oppressed alot of our people. So, I decided to be a better role model for the kids that I work with. I feel like that makes a big difference, being the role model. That's not what I wanna put out there. Working with kids has even changed the way I talk. I try to be more intentional in how I say things. Little kids have me rethinking my whole life sometimes.
Part of my? mission is really influencing healing in whatever way. That's the major one because [drinking] has broken up so many families.
Q: Do you have any upcoming work that you would like to share?
A: I'm currently teaching with Justice for my Sister. I’ve been working there for two years as their teaching and mural artist. We’re also doing mural projects in Compton and we’ll be starting one in Pasadena in September. I also do silkscreen for friends and businesses.
Jacqueline Aguirre is the Documentation and Archives Getty Intern at Self Help Graphics & Art. She is a lifelong art enthusiast and an undergraduate student at UCLA studying Linguistics.