Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding

Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding is the first major publication devoted to the career of this seminal Latinx artist, who was born in El Paso, TX, in 1937. Accompanying her first museum career retrospective (Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego [MCASD] March 16 - August 13, 2023), this volume surveys the artist’s decades of colorful photo and text-based artworks, book projects, large-scale installations, public works, and unpublished, associated archival materials. Color images and scholarly texts illuminate the artist’s themes—childhood learning and perception, bicultural and bilingual experience, youthful slips of mind and tongue—and her often playful, first-person approach using conceptual tools. Resulting artworks are at once intimate and cerebral, analytical and joyful—reflecting the complexities of childhood, especially on a bicultural and bilingual border. Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding provides the definitive volume on an influential yet under-studied artist and contributes to the growing field of scholarship on contemporary Latinx and Conceptual art. Alongside images, the book features a conversation between Álvarez Muñoz and longtime interlocuter and friend Roberto Tejada, as well as essays by the exhibition co-curators Kate Green and Isabel Casso, and Josh Franco, Head of Collecting at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Celia Álvarez Muñoz (b. 1937) grew up less than a mile from the US/Mexico border and studied art in high school in El Paso, TX. She received a B.A. from Texas Western University (now University of Texas at El Paso) and M.F.A. from North Texas State University (now University of North Texas). Álvarez Muñoz’s work has been widely exhibited since the late 1980s. In 1991, her work was presented in a solo project at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and also in the Whitney Biennial. From 2002-2004, her exhibition Stories Your Mother Never Told You traveled to museums throughout Texas, including the El Paso Museum of Art. Álvarez Muñoz is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Awards, in Photography and New Genres; the CAA Committee on Women in the Arts Recognition Award; the Honors Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts by Women’s Caucus for Art; and Art League Houston’s 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2021, Álvarez Muñoz was named one of fifteen inaugural Latinx Artist Fellows by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation.