Bio
Alice Garik is an artist who explores and expresses our connections, through our bodies, with nature. With this visceral connection at the core of her work, she uses the photographic processes of platinum/palladium printing, requiring drawing and painting, on organically sourced handmade Japanese gampi paper. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Collections and Exhibits
Alice exhibits widely and her work is held in various collections.
Garik’s Vermont work is in the collection of The Brooklyn Museum. The New York Public Library holds her dance work. Her work is in The Polaroid Collection and corporate collections. She has executed illustrations for book covers and her work has been on the sets of several popular movies and TV series. Work from her tattoo project was exhibited in 2017 in “Tattooed New-York” at The New-York Historical Society in NYC. In 2020 Alice exhibited in an online exhibit with the Berlin Collectiv and in another curated exhibition, “Naturatis” in 2021. In 2021 two portfolios were selected for the online exhibit “(Nature In) Lockdown” in Floresta Magazine. Garik exhibited in “The Art of Coney Island” at The Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition in the summer of 2021. In the fall of 2021 her work was exhibited in “Oc.cu.pied”, a curated exhibition of art by women, as part of Arts Gowanus Open Studios in Brooklyn. In the spring of 2022, Alice exhibited in “Fragile Rainbow: Traversing Habitats”, curated by Sue Spaid with members of EcoArtSpace and in “Act Natural” an online Berlin Collectiv exhibition. In summer 2022, Garik exhibited with BWAC in the show “More Art of Coney Island”. In 2023-2024 Garik exhibited with AzureArtsNYC in a curated three artist exhibit on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In 2023-2024, her work was featured in the lobby of The Brooklyn Workspace, Brooklyn, NY. In November, 2024, Garik’s exhibited works honoring women, children and nature in a juried show “Spectrum of Exposure” at BWAC in Brooklyn, NY. Her work was selected to respond to “Power and Privilege” at Coffey Park, Brooklyn in 2025. Her participation in Arts Gowanus Open Studios in 2025 was described by viewers as awesome because of the complexity of the layering in the work combined with the poetry of poet and essayist Diane Mehta. In early 2026, Garik’s work was part of an exhibit and collective Infinitive Quilt at Gallery MC, New York City.
In 2025, Garik was an artist resident in a BioArt residency program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Since 2023, Garik’s works are part of White Column’s curated artist registry.
Art and Photography Studies
Her studies with Philip Guston and Theordoros Stamos as an undergraduate at Brandeis University informs her foundation in painting and drawing which she now brings to her process of brushing platinum and palladium on Japanese gampi. As an artist resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Alice continued with her painting practice.
Fascinated by the immediacy of photography and the creative work in the darkroom, Garik pursued photojournalism at The New School, studied with the editors of National Geographic at the University of Missouri, studied with Eikoh Hosoe at The Center for Photography at Woodstock and was a photography intern at The Village Voice. She studied alternative printing and fine art conceptual practices at the International Center for Photography. Alice preferred and still prefers black and white film and the experimental darkroom work that is part of her practice today. Time spent developing and enlarging negatives to then layer them for the brushed platinum palladium emulsion is part of the suspense and spontaneity that her painting studies gave.
Photographing Dancers and Women’s Stories
Garik’s interests in the human form and photographic movement studies led her to photograph dancers and dance performances. From 1994-1996, DANCE INK commissioned her to photograph dancer and choreographer Neil Greenberg and ABT dancer Angel Corella.
Garik used her alternative printing to tell stories of the rural life in Vermont. She photographed with a 4X5″ camera and, using the painterly process of palladium printing, formed a grid of four photographs together to tell expanded stories of people and landscape. In 1999, when ORION Magazine commissioned her to illustrate an article on perception, she used this method.
Experiencing our society’s disconnection from respecting women, children and nature, Garik looked to myths and fairy tales to articulate these missing connections. With the Grimm fairy tale, “Brother, Sister”, Garik worked on a series of photographs with an actress and began using natural artifacts as symbols: a deer antler and a rose to symbolize caring for a wild faun and giving birth to a child.
Biological Transformations
She also looked at the transformations for women to motherhood. To document this life changing biological process, Garik would photograph the fully pregnant woman and hold the 4X5″ negatives until the baby was born to now photograph the baby. These compressed photographs told the story of the woman, her biological transformation and her newly birthed baby. The methods she developed capturing mother and child were then applied to her most recent series, superimposing and compressing images of bodies with flora and fauna.
Poetic Merging of Tattoos within Nature
Beginning in 2015, Garik’s daughter started to explore how her sense of self moved out from her flesh by having tattoos. One of her first tattoos was Daphne from the Greek myth. This inspired Garik to explore how tattoos, embedded with myths, icons, plants and animals, express human veneration of nature. In this current body of work, she layers elements of the natural world with photographs she takes of people’s tattoos, proposing her own visual meditation on mending our severed connection to nature.