Celia Muñoz Alvarez

Robert Tejada explores the artist, Celia Muñoz Alvarez through a series of interviews, meetups, and artwork analysis. As a Houston native myself, artwork in the bordering cities of Texas with Mexico is inspired heavily by both sides. Muñoz Alvarez was born in the El Paso area around the depression era, this is when many men were being put through arduous work and struggling to make a means was more challenging. The divide was very prevalent in her childhood, which she bases most of her work on. Muñoz Alvarez went back to school in her forties to get her MFA and specifically chose University of North Texas – Denton since it specialized in avant-garde work in the state. Since then, she has engrossed herself into the genre of folk, traditional, avant-garde art. Some of her artwork is a combination of Catholic and local urban street art. She also depicts historical and linguistic differences in her works by using mixed media such as texts to accompany the image. Her images can be very subliminal with hidden definitions and puns that people similar to her can relate.

Muñoz Alvarez’s What Came First?, 1982, is initially a rather obscure and random image of five identical eggs perfectly lined up in a row. There are eight photos of the rowed eggs with five grade school assigned sentences describing a chicken laying an egg in a variety of tenses like past, present, and future. However, the last sentence is grammatically incorrect although it makes sense in her view, the text reads, “The chicken lies everyday,” which claims the chicken is actually lying and not laying eggs. Muñoz Alvarez’s grandmother shared to her about how chickens lay eggs from their mouth as an effort to avert from sex education. This made young Muñoz Alvarez confused and passive with the linguistics even more than she was. She made childhood mistakes in language due to different linguistic cultures. As for the visual content, the eggs are all the same size, but it fluctuates due to the angles it’s taken in, therefore the eggs are lying about their sizes. Muñoz Alvarez includes an additional pun, eggs are translated to “huevos” in Spanish and it’s often referred to men’s testicles or manhood, which men might often lie about too.