LA JOLLA, Calif. — Celia Alvarez Munoz: Break the link suggests an artist who grew up speaking two different visual languages: the pared-down intellectualism of conceptual art’s sparse text-image combos and a cheeky vernacular of the bright colors of the Tex-Mex frontier and Indigenous roots. Indeed, Álvarez Muñoz’s exhibition at the La Jolla location of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, his first museum retrospective, reflects his delight in fusing the binaries – the personal and the political, the Spanish and English languages , conceptual art and storytelling – presenting them as messy and inseparably linked.
Keen to unearth cultural hypocrisy and stand up for exploited people, Álvarez Muñoz responds to social injustice using both direct condemnation and emotional restraint. Such a lesson in the latter comes from the installation “El Limite” (1991). She combines large black and white photomurals of model trains made from sardine cans with text about her father’s life. A traveling train-hopper in his youth, he also spent time on trains in Europe while fighting in World War II, which the artist links to the Mexican Revolution and the Bracero program of the 1940s by including smaller photographs documentaries of that time.
The Bracero program, which ran from 1942 to 1964, granted work permits to Mexican laborers to fill American labor shortages resulting from the war. While protection against discrimination was “guaranteed”, many braceros faced various difficulties, ranging from non-payment of wages to racism and lynchings in retaliation. Many American farm workers felt threatened by the presence of low-wage Mexican workers, but in the end both were largely replaced by machines. Álvarez Muñoz organizes a combination of images and texts that allows the viewer to do the work of interpreting these abuses of power.
In “Fibra y Furia” (1997), Álvarez Muñoz once again addresses workplace abuse, this time focusing on gender discrimination. Large swaths of fabric hang dramatically from the museum’s high ceilings are paired with stereotypical housewife dresses. This visually compelling piece comments on the fashion industry’s exploitation of female labor to manufacture garments that ironically hold women captive to their gender identity. “Fresas” (1997) also denounces the sexualization of women in society. The “booty” denim shorts are cut into a thong in which the crotch is revealingly replaced with red sequined fabric, linking objectification to how women’s work in the garment industry is undervalued .
One of the artist’s best-known pieces, “Petrocuatyl” (1981), is both an installation and a performative lecture that the artist gave in response to the mission of a graduate history professor from art at North Texas State University. Instead of giving a generic presentation, Álvarez Muñoz came disguised as a teacher and told the class that her “husband” would organize an exhibit around a recently discovered pre-conquest site in Mexico City. (The current professor’s husband was a curator at the Kimball Art Museum.) Álvarez Muñoz then presented her own sculpture as an “actual artifact” from the site – a mask she constructed from a vintage World War II respirator. adorned with pearls and feathers, which belonged, she says in character, to Petrocuatyl, a (fictional) Aztec god recently discovered. In this humorous and cheeky response to a simple art history assignment, Álvarez Muñoz questions the authenticity of art history and archeology and inserts herself, a Chicana artist, into her male-dominated white narrative.
Sadly underrepresented in the current canon of art history, Álvarez Muñoz has been making such dynamic interventions in contemporary conceptual art for over four decades. Flooded with both art historical references and cultural specificities, the exhibited works are also imbued with the artist’s verve. Throughout the exhibition, she refuses to fit neatly into the box of Chicana or conceptual artist, instead walking the line of both. The nuanced work requires patient vision and a willingness to unpack the multitude of personal and political stories that permeate its essence.
Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Bond continues at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art (700 Prospect Street, La Jolla, CA) through August 13. The exhibition was curated by Dr Kate Green, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philbrook Museum of Art, and Isabel Casso.
