Artists exploring and growing together.
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Group Practice’s mission is to empower and connect working artists through experimental and collaborative programming.
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Our vision is of an inclusive and sustainable artist community that aims to be accessible to artists who share our values of collective empowerment, life-long learning, and mutual care.
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GP maintains a commitment to:
Collaboration, Reciprocity and Mutual Care
Open and Authentic Dialogue
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Experimentation and
Risk-taking
Accountability and Transparency
Collaboration, Reciprocity and Mutual Care
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We care for and value each other and the spaces we build together.
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We believe in sharing our time and resources in service of our mutual growth as artists.
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We center collaboration as a means to generate new directions in our practice and as a model for broader collective engagement.
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We acknowledge our varied individual needs while extending our respect and responsibility toward each other.
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We ask that everyone be engaged and responsible in caring for themselves, and to identify their needs for a supportive environment from GP.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
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We work to create a transformative network that weaves together our different identities and experiences towards a more culturally equitable system.
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We aim to bring awareness to and dismantle societal and racial inequalities that continue to harm us and our communities.
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We are committed to offering alternatives to hierarchical systems that enact gatekeeping and privilege.
Open and Authentic Dialogue
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We center integrity and trust as foundations for open and honest dialogue.
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We practice empathetic listening and reflection as critical tools for growth and collaboration.
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We are composed of differing perspectives and work to nurture safe and open critical dialogue.
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We value every person’s presence and recognize that our contributions may differ in how they take form.
Experimentation and Risk-taking
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We celebrate risk-taking, experimentation, and failure as fundamental parts of making art and community building.
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We are committed to the pedagogical lineages of Paulo Freire and bell hooks, which redefine education as a practice of freedom and strive to counter educational models that reinforce domination.
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We believe that non-linear education is essential to producing radical growth for individuals, a community, and our organization.
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We strive to renegotiate the boundaries of a classroom using virtual and site-specific sessions.
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We celebrate weirdness, play, and humor by upholding the belief that excitement and rigor are not mutually exclusive.
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We interrogate the established ideas of success and perfectionism, as they are byproducts of our current inequitable system of capitalism and privilege.
Accountability and Transparency
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While Group Practice is currently without a fixed location, the founders acknowledge their presence on the unceded territories of the Gabrielino/Tongva (Tōng-VA) peoples. We are committed to furthering our understanding of this history and the ways can further support and show respect for these communities.
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We strive towards transparency at all levels and invite input from all those invested.
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We understand that conflict has the capacity to build bridges for growth, and we seek to facilitate this process with respect and understanding.
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We strive to make Group Practice as affordable as possible. The income collected funds scholarships for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ participants and pays our facilitators a fair wage.
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We do not have all the “answers.” We are all learning together as we go.
Group Practice is founded by Kim Garcia, Amy MacKay, and Liz Stringer. After confronting a historic level of isolation in 2020-21, the demand for meaningful connection felt more powerful than ever. In response to this newfound urgency, they developed Group Practice. This initiative aims to provide an affordable platform to facilitate experimental programs for working artists to explore and grow together.
Group Practice is owned and operated by its facilitators who are committed to non-hierarchical and democratic structures. They hold the value that the arts are central to the experience of learning and life.
Photos by Matt Savitsky @mintymedia
Samantha
May
Marketing Executive
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Kim Garcia is an artist working in sculpture, drawing, and painting. Her practice explores social dynamics and residual trauma from interpersonal relationships, community structures, and memory. Kim comes from a background in creating collaborative community projects that often employ alternative spaces to explore studio art practices, site-specific collaboration, and museum and exhibition research. She is the founder of The Cold Read, an online critique group and artist collective that engages gestures of care and support through writing. And is one of the co-founders of after hours gallery, a semi-online art gallery in Los Angeles that hosts seasonal two-person exhibitions. Kim is based in Los Angeles and received her BA from UC San Diego and her MFA from UC Irvine.
Samantha
May
Marketing Executive
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Amy MacKay is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles. Through an intensive research based process, Mackay stages collaborative performance events that are then recorded into painting. A student of both UC Irvine (MFA 2018) and Bard College (BFA 2007), MacKay has a committed history to alternative arts organizing. Some examples include the peer based education group Bayview Center for Peer Based Learning (BCPBL) in San Francisco, the collaborative women’s art collective BGBC and the after hours gallery. Before moving to Los Angeles in 2013, she worked for five years at the education non-profit Making Waves in San Francisco and spent 11 years developing programming at the residential arts summer program, The Oxbow School, in Napa, California.
Samantha
May
Marketing Executive
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Liz Stringer is an artist, arts administrator and educator based in Long Beach. In her practice, Stringer uses science fiction as a framework to fracture and rearticulate narrative boundaries between the physical and metaphysical. Collapsing scientific research to create a hybrid language that transforms into multimedia installations of smell, ceramic, and drawing. She received her dual Bachelor’s degree from UC San Diego (BFA & BS 2016), and is currently working towards her MFA at UC Irvine. Stringer has led programs for youth, teens, and adults as a gallery educator through the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and at La Jolla Country Day School for grades 5 -12 for the past seven years. She is currently involved in the sixth and ongoing version of INSITE.