LA JOLLA, Calif. — Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding suggests an artist who grew up talking two totally different visible languages: the pared-down intellectualism of conceptual artwork’s sparse text-and-image combos and a brazen vernacular of the Tex-Mex border’s shiny colours and Indigenous roots. Certainly, Álvarez Muñoz’s exhibition on the La Jolla location of the Museum of Up to date Artwork San Diego, her first museum retrospective, displays her enjoyment of merging binaries — the non-public and political, the Spanish and English languages, conceptual artwork and storytelling — presenting them as messily and inseparably conjoined.
With an eye fixed for unearthing cultural hypocrisy and advocating for exploited folks, Álvarez Muñoz responds to social injustice, utilizing each direct condemnation and emotional restraint. One such lesson within the latter comes from the set up “El Limite” (1991). She {couples} giant black and white photomurals depicting toy trains constituted of sardine cans with a textual content about her father’s life. A touring train-hopper in his youth, he additionally frolicked on trains in Europe whereas combating throughout World Warfare II, which the artist ties to the Mexican Revolution and the Bracero Program of the Nineteen Forties by together with smaller documentary pictures from that point.
The Bracero program, which ran from 1942 to 1964, granted work permits to laborers from Mexico to fill in US labor gaps ensuing from the conflict. Whereas safety from discrimination was “assured,” many braceros confronted a wide range of hardships, from non-payment of wages to racism and retaliatory lynchings. Many American agricultural staff felt threatened by the Mexican staff’ low-wage presence, however ultimately each had been largely changed by machines. Álvarez Muñoz curates a mixture of photographs and textual content that enables the viewer to do the work of deciphering these abuses of energy.
In “Fibra y Furia” (1997), Álvarez Muñoz addresses labor abuses but once more, this time with a deal with gender discrimination. Massive swathes of material hanging dramatically from the excessive museum ceilings are paired with stereotypical housewife clothes. This visually compelling piece feedback on the style trade’s exploitation of feminine labor to make clothes that mockingly maintain ladies captive of their gendered identities. “Fresas” (1997) likewise exposes the sexualization of ladies in society. Denim “booty” shorts are lower right into a thong through which the crotch is tellingly changed with crimson sequined material, connecting objectification to the best way feminine labor within the garment trade is undervalued.
One of many artist’s best-known items, “Petrocuatyl” (1981), is each an set up and a performative lecture the artist gave as a response to a graduate artwork historical past professor’s task at North Texas State College. As an alternative of giving a generic presentation, Álvarez Muñoz got here dressed because the trainer and instructed the category that her “husband” would curate an exhibition round a lately found pre-conquest web site in Mexico Metropolis. (The precise professor’s husband was a curator on the Kimball Artwork Museum.) Álvarez Muñoz went on to current her personal sculpture as an “precise artifact” from the positioning — a masks she constructed from a classic WWII respirator adorned with beads and feathers, which belonged, she mentioned in character, to Petrocuatyl, a (fictional) lately found Aztec god. On this cheekily humorous response to a easy artwork historical past task, Álvarez Muñoz each calls into query the authenticity of artwork historical past and archeology and inserts herself, a Chicana artist, into its White, male-dominated narrative.
Woefully under-represented within the present canon of artwork historical past, Álvarez Muñoz has been making such dynamic interventions into modern conceptual artwork for greater than 4 a long time. Awash in each artwork historic references and cultural specificity, the artworks on show are additionally imbued with the artist’s wit. Throughout the exhibition, she refuses to suit neatly into both field of Chicana or conceptual artist, relatively strolling the road of each. The nuanced work requires affected person viewing and a willingness to unpack the multitude of private and political histories that permeate its essence.
Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding continues on the Museum of Up to date Artwork San Diego (700 Prospect Avenue, La Jolla, California) by means of August 13. The exhibition was curated by Dr. Kate Inexperienced, curator of recent and modern artwork at Philbrook Museum of Artwork, and Isabel Casso.