Early in her career, the El Paso, Texas, native had created works that made use of the physical form of a book, such as the series of volumes that made up her “Enlightenment” series. But when she was offered the opportunity to create an exhibit for the Tyler (Texas) Museum of Art, Álvarez Muñoz knew she had to break free from the book. “This was to be my first major solo exhibit, and I was given a big space I was to fill, so I knew I needed to create a big piece,” Álvarez Muñoz recalled.
“I had done this postcard book, called ‘Postales,’ so I took the images from that and projected them on the wall in my house and got busy with an airbrush.” The result is what visitors will first encounter when they enter “Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding,” the retrospective exhibit of this acclaimed Chicana conceptual artist that opens June 5 at Philbrook Museum of Art. The large-scale images of the sort of houses she saw growing up in El Paso are interspersed with text panels that evoke childhood memories, so that they resemble pages from a gigantic children’s book.
From the ceiling hang green street signs that juxtapose English and Spanish words with how they might be mispronounced — “Mesa,” for example, becomes “Maysa,” and “Spruce” is repeated as “Esproos.” The inspiration for the piece, Álvarez Muñoz said, was the Chamizal dispute between the United States and Mexico, when a change in the flow of the Rio Grande River chang.
