Madison Alexa Garay

writer + curator + art historian

based in new mexico

Photo by Dominic Valdez, in Glenrio, NM/TX, 2024.

Madison Garay is a storyteller. In some spaces, she is a visual culture scholar. In others, she is a creative collaborator. Increasingly, she is a boots-on-the-ground arts and culture reporter. Always, in spirit, she is an orbweaver and Route 66 mystic.

Madison received her M.A. in Art History (Art of the Americas) in 2025 from the University of New Mexico. Her research focused on placemaking and formulation of regional identities in the built, vernacular environments of Route 66 through the Land of Enchantment. Madison also holds a B.A. in History of Art and Visual Culture from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she investigated the economy of images shared online during the California wildfires.

Garay is a casual internet anthropologist, expressed through her artistic practice, where deep digital memory and web artifacts are reconstructed in video collages. Most importantly, she is a bonafide roadfan.

e.e. cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

from E.E. Cummings, Complete Poems: 1904-1962.

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