Pride Center of Vermont and the Pride Vermont 2024 Committee are thrilled to announce Joules Garcia (they) as the artist of Pride Vermont’s 2024 Parade and Festival. Joules is a Burlington-based artist and community organizer whose illustrations have been featured in publications such as The New York Times and Eater Magazine. They are the organizer of the incredibly successful Burlington Dyke Night events, including an upcoming beach day on August 25th at Oakledge Beach, and co-creator of “Strapped-In: A Queer Comedy Showcase” on September 5th at Vermont Comedy Club. Keep reading below for Joules’s artist statement, as well as a reveal of Pride Vermont 2024’s “Joy + Liberation” illustration, done by Joules.
Joy & Liberation, I find, is a perfect title for this chapter of my life in Burlington, Vermont.
My name is Joules Garcia, and I moved here back in 2020. I was, then, a student freshly graduated from college with all the inner turmoil and crushing anxiety that haunts; scares; restrains anyone in their early 20s. But in Burlington I found joy, and in my last year here, surrounded now by the friends I’ve come to embrace, I have also found liberation.
Today, I am a proud freelance illustrator – which really is the only reason I was able to land the honor of being Vermont Pride’s 2024 Featured Artist. But I am also an obnoxious lesbian; a self described femme of color, whose relationship to their womanhood is bigender to acknowledge both the Western gender binary I was colonized with and the womanhood my mother language taught me when I grew up in the Philippines. I am also in love, and irrevocably so, with the butch to my femme, and in him I see only more of that same joy and liberation that I am leaving Burlington with. I love women; I love all those who chose womanhood and continue to choose it, celebrate it and cherish it. I love the freedom in knowing the kind of womanness I’ve carved out for myself, and love more the varying experiences of those who’ve chosen it. I love, even, those who have rejected it, who have found something new that speaks to themselves instead. I love it all – and at the end of the day I am a lesbian with boundless love, and that’s really all there is to it.
I am happy with my lot in life. I am happy with the freedom I now have, the confidence I think I lost in my early 20s. I am glad that this is my opportunity to give back to a city that gave me more than I’ve realized.
To see the full Pride Vermont 2024 art created by Joules, click here!