Roberto Tejada Celia Alvarez Muñoz

Roberto Tejada Celia Alvarez Muñoz

 Born in El Paso Texas in 1937, Celia grew up with competing languages and consistently found herself straddling the line between “defiance and diplomacy” in a country that conformed to a cultural binary. Her art is widely focused on her suppressed cultural background and making bold statements without using dialogue but rather other mediums such as sculpture, paintings and poems. Celia as an artist, took on the battle of contaminating the purity of genres and the homogeneity of topics discussed in art which, Tejada searches for meaning in. 

An important piece of Celia's is titled Tolido which is a mixed media piece created in 1989. The piece calls into question the use of tall fences and also acts as a way to look into the past and reminisce on old memories. Muñoz’s piece, parallels the idea of an outer self and inner self, where the inner self cannot be seen unless the outer self is stripped away. A poem on the inside of the structure speaks of a hidden treasure that was in her grandmother’s backyard that would glow every day at seven pm. Digging deeper, the poem asks for viewers to see that not only is she challenging the idea of a hidden identity but also of her grandmother’s house being a treasure in itself. For Muñoz, her grandmother’s house was a sort of a safe haven where culture was celebrated and where Muñoz found her type of treasure in.  Though this piece, Muñoz describes not only the challenges she faced in seeing value in her culture when other didn’t, but also her wrestle with her inner and outer self as a Chicana female and the suppression of her culture.