Roberto Tejada: Celia Alvarez Muñoz

Celia Alvarez Muñoz took five color photographs and added two different kinds of text below the photo panels, in 1982 for her MFA.  This work is titled, Enlightenment #4: Which Came First?  The artist compares her confusion over learning English, to her confusion around chickens, in the text directly below the photos.  Below that line of text, she includes a strip of paper that children in elementary school use to learn how to write.  On the paper, she writes five different –tenses of a sentence about when a chicken lays an egg.  This piece forces the viewer to think about the issue of language, and how it can manifest when a child like Alvarez Muñoz is speaking Spanish at home, while forced to speak and write in only English in school.  The photos show five eggs lined up next to one another, from varying perspectives.  Most of the perspectives make the eggs seem as though they are in a perfectly straight row, and all the same size.  In the beginning of the book, she mentions a reoccurring dream where she finds herself in a marching band and over it.  There is a notable similarity between this dream and her eggs, which appear to be “marching” in all of the panels except for the last where they are turned towards the viewer to reveal that they are indeed different sizes.