Breaking the Binding

Breaking the Binding provides the definitive volume on an influential yet under-studied artist and contributes to the growing field of scholarship on contemporary Latinx and Conceptual art. Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding is the first major publication devoted to the career of this seminal Latinx artist, who was born in El Paso, TX, in 1937. Accompanying her first museum career retrospective (Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, March 16-August 13, 2023), this volume surveys the artist’s decades of colorful photo and text-based artworks, book projects, large-scale installations, public works, and unpublished, associated archival materials. Color images and scholarly texts illuminate the artist’s themes—childhood learning and perception, bicultural and bilingual experience, youthful slips of mind and tongue—and her often playful, first-person approach using conceptual tools. Resulting artworks are at once intimate and cerebral, analytical and joyful—reflecting the complexities of childhood, especially on a bicultural and bilingual border. Alongside images, the book features a conversation between Álvarez Muñoz and longtime interlocuter and friend Roberto Tejada, as well as essays by the exhibition co-curators Kate Green and Isabel Casso, and Josh Franco, Head of Collecting at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.