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Hector Garcia was born in 1933 to Puerto Rican parents and raised in the South Bronx, New York. He earned his B.F.A. in sculpture from the John Herron Institute of Art in Indianapolis in 1966 and an M.F.A. from Indiana University, with additional scholarship study at the Instituto Allende in Mexico. In 1966 he came to Fort Wayne — in his own later telling, because "they needed a sculptor" — to teach sculpture and drawing at the Fort Wayne Art School. He taught in the city for three decades, through the art school's 1976 merger into Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne, and retired as professor emeritus of fine arts.
Garcia became the defining public sculptor of modern Fort Wayne. His ten-foot bronze Little Turtle in Headwaters Park, commissioned by the Fort Wayne American Revolution Bicentennial Commission and dedicated on October 18, 1976, is among the city's most recognized works of art; his other Fort Wayne pieces include the Jesuit Priest (1974), a bust of John Nuckols — the city's first African American councilman — in 1985, The Good Shepherd for the Fort Wayne Rescue Mission, a tribute to K9 police officers at the Fort Wayne Police Department, the history reliefs at Citizens Square, and a series of twenty-two busts of area leaders now at Purdue Fort Wayne. He designed the City of Fort Wayne Bicentennial Medal and the State of Indiana Bicentennial Medal; his Freedom Flame medal is in the Smithsonian's Cabinet of Medals. Arts United gave him the Mayor's Arts Award in 2019 for a sixty-year career in public sculpture. His wife Carol was also an artist, and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art profiled them jointly after his death. Garcia died in his sleep on March 28, 2024, aged 91.
Sources: Fort Wayne Museum of Art blog, "Historical Highlight: Hector and Carol Garcia" (Sue Slick, 2025); Garcia obituary, Fort Wayne Newspapers via Legacy.com (2024); Waynedale News, August 29, 2014; Stillwater Hospice, "Hector Garcia, Dreaming and Drawing"; ACGSI.