The Artist and the Book
Celia Álvarez Muñoz in Conversation with Roberto Tejada
Thursday, April 10, 2025 6 p.m.-7 p.m.
Artists have long used books as tools for education and inspiration. Increasingly, contemporary artists make books and research central to their artistic practice, examining the past and often creating new narratives. In this conversation, artist Celia Álvarez Muñoz and professor Roberto Tejada explore the role that books and research play for contemporary artists and creators.
Muñoz is a leading Latina conceptual artist whose multi-media work frequently addresses the linguistic, cultural, and political worlds of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, where she grew up. Tejada is a poet, critic, translator, and University of Houston professor whose research involves the linguistic and image worlds of Latin America and U.S. Latinx cultural production.
A book signing follows the conversation. This event is free and open to the public and will take place in the Hirsch Library Reading Room, located on the lower level of the Beck Building.
Learn more here.
Celia Álvarez Muñoz has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Awards, the College Art Association’s Committee on Women in the Arts Recognition Award, and Art League Houston’s Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts Award. Her work has been exhibited in major exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial, Radical Women: Latin American Art 1960–1985, and Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The Hirsch Library has acquired two of her seminal artists’ books: Which Came First? and Double Bubble and WWII.
Roberto Tejada is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor of creative writing and art history at the University of Houston. He has published more than a dozen books of historical focus and his own poetry, including National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment. He was also the author of the first major treatment of Muñoz’s work for UCLA’s A Ver: Revisioning Art History series, and he contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue for her most recent survey exhibition. Tejada is a longtime member of the MFAH Libraries and Archives Committee.
Celia Álvarez Muñoz
Breaking the Binding
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.
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, 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.
Alongside images, the book features a conversation between Álvarez Muñoz and longtime interlocutor 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.
Book Images by Lindsey Kennedy.
Portrait of Celia: photo by Stacy Keck, Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
Portrait of Roberto: photo by Michael Bryan.