February 8 - March 29, 2025
From Tureen:
“Tureen is pleased to present Apothecary Rx, a solo exhibition of new and historical work by renowned Texas-based artist Celia Àlvarez Muñoz. Spanning over fifty years of the artist’s career, the show reveals the myriad strategies she has employed to contend with the interstices between mass media and life in borderlands.
The exhibition’s center is, unmistakably, a fiber installation encompassing the majority of the front gallery commissioned by San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and most recently exhibited in the traveling retrospective Breaking the Binding, which began at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. A spectacle grandstanding no less than a film set, Fibra (1996) commands physical engagement with a maze-like invitation. Moving through the various columns of chintzy fabric bolts one feels the distinct sensations of sinking and floating as if entangled in an underwater field of middlebrow seaweed. Inspired by Ophelia’s fall to her death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, this is exactly the scene Àlvarez Muñoz intended to set. Here she goes toe to toe with the allure of pop culture’s impossible depiction of young girls as simultaneously vulnerable and stoic, resigned even. Ophelia’s dress was her undoing, the form itself and the fabric that pulled her under, yet she didn’t struggle against its grip singing songs as it drowned her. The whole scene boldly straddles the line between tragedy and pastiche; Àlvarez Muñoz no more derides the absurdity of pop culture’s aesthetics than she embraces them. The references to Hamlet, the all-consuming installation, the fabrics chosen each play to a democratic appreciation for absurdity—her protagonist is the everywoman.
And yet there is a more political reality, a darker undercurrent running through Fibra to which the artist hopes to lead her viewer. Contemporaneous to the time of its making, and very near to where the artist was raised in the Texas borderlands, a commercial exploitation of female labor was taking place at an unprecedented rate. Between the increasing availability of cheap Mexican labor and the passage of NAFTA in 1994 to give U.S. corporations unlimited tax-favorable access to that labor, there occurred an explosion in the development of maquiladoras and their employment of young Mexican women. Hired to produce some of the very fabrics and garments mimicked in this installation, they were paid less than subsistence wages and subject to unspeakable abuses in the workplace and beyond. Ironically, Àlvarez Muñoz hired a costume design company that made garments for the likes of the San Francisco Opera House to produce the clothing displayed here. This inversion of the dominant flow of trade in the 1990s is just one more sleight of hand she employs to disorient the unsuspecting viewer. Like the subconscious tug of a product placement in film or television she gives the people what they want before they know it themselves, but the results of this artful marketing ploy leave a more bitter-than-expected aftertaste. The women to whom this work pays homage remain powerless in the face of the enteral consumption engine.
Flanking Fibra on one wall is a work Alvarez Muñoz once called “a bestseller—my token exotic piece,” Ella y El (1988) stands as one of the artist’s most important assemblages of the period. It consists of two gendered still-life photographs framed within the doors of a miniature cabinet de curiosités and a collection of milagros and calaveras enclosed within. The photographs, one of a girl’s dress labeled “Ella” and one of a boy’s christening gown labeled “El,” depict a highly stylized alter scape of the most traditionally Mexican variety. Inside the cabinet are two poems describing the individuals about whom the photographs were made, and on the interior side of each door hang the imagined trappings of their storied lives. The work serves, in part, as an earnest testament to the role tradition plays in love between two people. But it also satirizes its own contents with a winking subtlety. Installation of the cabinet in most any art space, especially that of the Whitney Museum where it hung in the 1991 Biennial, exposes the exoticism often perpetrated by institutions in their display of work made by nonwhite artists and the superficial fascination with folkloric content of a predominantly white viewership. The story of the two lovers yields not just romanticism but a stereotypically gendered brand of romanticism in cultural tradition that sees each pigeonholed into a pair of tropes. Ella y El operates as a simultaneous homage to and takedown of its own making.
Equally concerned with the ways in which her own biography intertwines with broader cultural histories, Àlvarez Muñoz adopts a more intimate kind of art making in the Enlightenment series she began in the late 1970s. Here represented by Ave Maria Purísima (Enlightenment 8) (1983), another example held in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, she combines text and image in a way that art historian Roberto Tejada deemed an adjacent work in the series one that “dismantled that ‘self-authenticating pathos’ given to transpose conviction or experience into universal identity.” (Pg. 51 of RT). The work on view consists of a set of eight C-prints framed in ash wood serially depicting an apple being eaten one bite at a time and culminating with the standalone image of a coiled snake. Àlvarez Muñoz captions the prints with single lines of an impliedly personal story from early childhood in which the mother sends the girl out to play after a bath but forgets to put on her underwear. When the wind catches the girl’s dress and a neighbor sees this, she is exposed to a public shame and returns inside to her mother demanding another bath. Biblical references to the snake in the Garden of Eden and Eve’s temptation thereby are unmistakable; the shame of conscious self-exposure is all but literally spelled out. What one notices first, however, is the kind of democratic structure with which the work is ordered, serial like a comic strip or children’s book, picture over text ad infinitum. The narrative behaves like those texts as well with a beginning, climax and denouement in the form of a lesson. These visual cues invite scrutiny, they draw an audience in with an aesthetic familiarity. In a more multicultural way, and at the same time that other Pictures Generation artists used the structures found in mass media to belie deeper revelations during the Reaganite 1980s, Àlvarez Muñoz made the personal and familiar universal.
The exhibition’s title takes its inspiration from another intimate detail of the artist’s personal history—the origins of this very exhibition space. Built in the late 1800s it originally operated as a tuberculosis hospital, the building burned down in the early 1900s and was rebuilt in exact copy to continue serving as Oak Cliff’s pharmacy for another half-century. As a center of commerce and community for this majority-Hispanic business and residential Dallas district, the pharmacy, and its new life as an exhibition space for contemporary art, inspired in Àlvarez Muñoz the memory of a botánica and curiosities shop she and other neighborhood children would frequent in downtown El Paso. Among the countless objects for sale at which her and her friends would stare in wonder were jarred specimens of the niño de la tierra, a wormlike creature parents would warn their children not to touch for fear of a storied lethal bite. The plush toys on display in the gallery today in Vitro Babies (1997-2025) are harmless, though no less alluring to those who remember the Beanie Baby frenzy that swept America in the mid-1990s. One memorializing the death of Princess Diana, others designed after various household pets to maximize desirability among not just children but also obsessive adult collectors, these are specimens of the same drive for consumption that fueled the exploitation of female textile workers in Mexican border towns to which Fibra and its fabric apparitions speak. The contemporary art gallery, like the botánica, is a place of spectacle and discovery; its contents are a synthesis of the times in which it sits. El Paso Street leads quickly from downtown El Paso to a vehicular and pedestrian bridge into Ciudad Juárez where the systematic femicide of women laborers was at its peak simultaneous to the sales of Beanie Babies. It too has become an object of morbid fascination in the culture at large, its residents’ humanity stripped by the overuse of their tragedies for media bait and those femicides famously, incompetently unsolved even with American intervention. But what of their memorial, or the memorial to the countless lives lived between Texas and Mexico that so beautifully, if paradoxically, straddle two cultures? Look closer.”
Reception: February 8, 2025 | 6–8 pm
901 West Jefferson Boulevard
Dallas, 75208 Texas
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