Celia Alvarez Munoz: Breaking the Binding

Álvarez Muñoz’s photo/text works and installations reflect on the complexities of childhood on a bicultural and bilingual border

This is the first major publication on the seminal Texas-based Latinx artist Celia Álvarez Muñoz (born 1937). Accompanying her first museum career retrospective, it surveys her decades of colorful photo and text-based artworks, book projects, large-scale installations, public works and associated unpublished archival materials. Color images and scholarly texts illuminate Álvarez Muñoz’s themes—childhood learning and perception, bicultural and bilingual experience, slips of mind and tongue—and her often playful, first-person approach using conceptual tools. Breaking the Binding provides the definitive volume on an influential yet understudied artist. Alongside images, the book features a conversation between Álvarez Muñoz and longtime interlocutor and friend Roberto Tejada, as well as essays by exhibition cocurators Kate Green and Isabel Casso, and Josh Franco, Head of Collecting at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.