Celia Álvarez Muñoz

Celia Álvarez Muñoz is a Mexican American, conceptual, and multimedia artist known for her photography, painting, installations, public art, and writing. Born in El Paso, Texas, Álvarez Muñoz's work addresses the dichotomy of living between two cultures. Common themes in her practice include Catholicism, the Mexican American experience, the past versus the present, and English versus Spanish language. The artist incorporates family and “communal memories” in her pieces. She uses text and images to explore the ambiguous signs and signifiers where cultures meet and to communicate stories of American history, culture, and society.

She studied at Texas Western University (now University of Texas) in El Paso, starting in commercial art classes and finishing a BA in Art & Art Ed, all levels. Quickly thereafter, she began teaching art to children. After relocating several times to different parts of the country, Álvarez Muñoz, her husband and their two small children, returned to Texas. In 1977, at the age of forty, she enrolled in graduate school at North Texas State University (NTSU; now University of North Texas) in Denton. There, she took courses with the artists Vernon Fisher (b.1943) and Al Souza (b.1944), who influenced her conceptual practice across mediums, from artist's books and photographs to installations and public works. While attending NTSU, she began work on her series Enlightenment. Enlightenment tapped into her memories of growing up along the Mexican border in the aftermath of the Great Depression and WWII. Deeply committed to her bilingual and bicultural heritage, the artist plays with text, puns, and double meanings, regularly addressing such themes as cognitive development and language acquisition. Her most recent work continues to relate to the experiences of living in the physical as well as the psychological and political border zone.

Álvarez Muñoz has received numerous awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts grants (1988, 1991) and the Art League Houston Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts. In 2021, Álvarez Muñoz was awarded the Latinx Artist Fellowship, a groundbreaking initiative recognizing 15 of the most compelling Latinx visual artists in the United States today. She was named 2D Artist of 2022 by the Texas Commission on the Arts.

Her work has been exhibited widely in group exhibitions, such as the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, NY, and solo presentations at the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Capp Street Project, San Francisco, CA; and the University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX. A career retrospective titled Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2023 and traveled to the University Art Museum, Las Cruces, NM, and Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2024. Muñoz’s work was included in the invitational traveling exhibition Our Journeys/Our Stories: Portraits of Latino Achievement by the Smithsonian Institution and Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, among other exhibits. She has been reviewed and featured in publications such as Hyperallergic and Art in America. Her work has been acquired by public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; Ruby City, San Antonio, TX; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX.