Notes for My People
Carmen Lomas Garza, Barbacoa para Cumpleaños, 1993
Carmen Lomas Garza’s Barbacoa para Cumpleaños feels like summer held inside a painting. The scene almost reaches us through scent before sight: meat cooking outside, birthday cake waiting on the table, flowers in the yard, heat in the air, and people gathered in celebration. While the work captures a birthday barbecue, it also preserves something larger. Food, color, land, and family history move through the painting as cultural memory.
Garza gives full attention to the everyday details that hold memory. The backyard, table, cake, clothing, flowers, and open sky all become part of the story. Looking closely, the painting begins to ask something of us. Where does your eye go first? The food, the people, the color, the garden, the table? Which details feel familiar, even if this is not your exact memory? What does the body recognize before the mind begins to explain it?
This is where visual literacy becomes sensory. To read an image is not only to identify what appears within it, but to notice how meaning is made through composition, color, gesture, and atmosphere. Garza’s work reminds us that culture is often remembered through the senses first. We remember the food before the recipe. The weather before the date. The sound of people talking before the full story. Neuroaesthetics gives language to what many of us already know: color, pattern, scent, sound, and memory are deeply connected. Painting can activate feeling. Scent can return us to place.
The visual world of Barrio Pop Studio’s summer candle collection is inspired by Garza’s paintings of Chicano family life, celebration, food, music, and outdoor gathering. Her work holds the scale and electric energy of community in motion. Barrio Pop Studio translates that visual language into scent, using fragrance as another way to explore memory, place, and belonging.
Fruit moves through this collection as a bold and rebellious material language. Fruit that stains the hand. Fruit that drips. Fruit that carries sweetness, acidity, heat, and memory all at once. In this sense, fruit becomes a way to speak about marginalized intimacies, subversive creativity, queer resistance, and radical world building. It reminds us that what has been dismissed as too much, too loud, too ripe, or too different can also become the source of new cultural possibility.
For Barrio Pop Studio, scent is a way to build worlds from memory. It carries forward the rituals that shaped us while imagining cultural futures rooted in tenderness, abundance, and belonging. Our summer collection carries that spirit forward, not by illustrating Garza’s painting directly, but by honoring the world it makes visible: food, memory, care, and celebration as shared sensory memory. Living memory. Open table. Summer made for our people - arriving July 24.
Founder,
Carlos Moreno
