Awards
2008 CWA Annual Recognition Awards
CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) will honor two outstanding Chicana artists based in California and Texas—Amalia Mesa-Bains and Celia Álvarez Muñoz respectively—at its thirteenth annual Recognition Awards Ceremony. The ceremony takes place Friday, February 22, 2008, 5:30–7:00 PM in Dallas Ballroom B, First Floor, of the Adam’s Mark Hotel during the 96th Annual Conference in Dallas–Fort Worth. Advance tickets are available from CAA when you register for the conference and also onsite in the registration area.
In collaboration with CAA’s Services to Artists Committee, CWA is also organizing the panel “Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities,” featuring Mesa-Bains and Muñoz, among other Chicana artists, at ARTspace on Saturday, February 23, 2008, 12:30–2:00 PM. Please join the two committees in celebrating the amazing and continuing careers of the artists.
—Midori Yoshimoto, assistant professor of art history at New Jersey City University in Jersey City and CWA chair
Amalia Mesa-Bains
Amalia Mesa-Bains (photograph by David Royal/Monterey County Herald)
Amalia Mesa-Bains is an artist and cultural critic whose works, primarily interpretations of traditional Chicano altars, resonate in both contemporary formal terms and their ties to her Chicano community and history. As an author of scholarly articles and a nationally known lecturer on Chicano art, she has enhanced our understanding of multiculturalism and reflected major cultural and demographic shifts in the United States. Throughout her cross-disciplinary career, Mesa-Bains has worked to define a Chicano and Latino aesthetic in the US and Latin America and has pioneered the documentation and interpretation of long Chicano traditions in Mexican American art through her cultural activism and her own artworks.
Her work has been exhibited in national and international venues, including the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC; the Whitney Museum of American Art at Phillip Morris, El Museo del Barrio, and the Queens Museum of Art, all in New York; the Mexican Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, both in San Francisco; the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts; the Musée Art Contemporain in Lyon, France; the Kulturhuset in Stockholm; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.
Amalia Mesa-Bains, Transparent Migrations, 2002, mixed media, dimensions variable, as exhibited in Road to Aztlan: Art from a Mythic Homeland at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2001 (artwork © Amalia Mesa-Bains)
As an educator and community advocate, Mesa-Bains has served the San Francisco Unified School District and the San Francisco Arts Commission, and on the board of directors for Galeria de la Raza and the Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens. She received her BA (1966) from San Jose State College, her MA in interdiciplinary education (1971) from San Francisco State University, and another MA (1981) and her PhD (1983) in psychology from the Wright Institute in Berkeley. She has been presented with special achievement awards from the Association of American Cultures, the Association of Hispanic Artists, and the San Francisco State University Alumni. In 1995 she was presented with Stanford University’s Ernesto Galarza Award and, in 1996, the University of Texas at Austin Americo Paredes Award. She was a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1992.
Currently Mesa-Bains is the cochair of the Visual and Public Art Department of California State University, Monterey Bay. She recently coauthored a book with bell hooks entitled Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2006.)
—Janet Marquardt, professor of art history and women’s studies at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston and a CWA member.
Celia Álvarez Muñoz
Celia Álvarez Muñoz (photograph by the artist)
Celia Álvarez Muñoz is a Texas-based artist whose conceptually based cross-disciplinary work spans museum and gallery exhibitions and public artworks. Her photography and book-based multimedia works present themselves as a kind of information-storage device for bicultural politics and historical memory, at times triggered by United States/Mexican border experiences. Her site-specific installations have long labored to incorporate the histories of the ancient indigenous or current local populations. Among the first visual artists to bring to public attention to the disappeared women of Juarez—her Fibra y Furia: Exploitation Is in Vogue installation was presented in Texas and Mexico in 1999–2004—she has made her work as a timely remainder of issues not yet resolved. Avoiding the overt, Muñoz’s oeuvre is intellectually complex and ironic, undermining racial and gendered stereotypes. Through exquisitely crafted objects and installations, she aims to engage and incorporate larger segments of the population.
A recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, Muñoz has also accepted the Honors Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts from the Women’s Caucus for Art and the Outstanding Centennial Alumnus from the University of North Texas College of Arts and Sciences. Her work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally and was included in the 1991 Whitney Biennial. It can also be found in collections of major museums, universities, and corporations nationwide.
Celia Álvarex Muñoz, Postales, 1987, installation view at the Tyler Museum of Art of paintings (acrylic airbrush on canvas and mixed media), scrolls, street signs, and lawn furniture, paintings 72 x 108 in., scrolls 48 x 58 in. (artworks © Celia Álvarex Muñoz; photograph by Tracy Hicks)
As a public artist, Muñoz was instrumental for, among other projects, the overall conceptual design of the City of San Antonio Convention Center Expansion Project. She was also awarded a commission to collaborate with the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta on Dallas’s Latino Cultural Center. Muñoz is now working with Lake/Flato Architects and the City of San Antonio for the Main Plaza project, an extension of a previous project with the same architects on the Historic Civic Center River Link Project, which received a Mayor’s Award in 2001.
Recently, she has enjoyed a twenty-year survey of her photo/text–based work at the University of Texas at Arlington, which traveled to six other venues across the US. She has also completed a commission for an exhibition, Our Journeys/Our Stories: Portraits of Latino Achievement, in the Smithsonian Institute’s American Voices series, which is traveling internationally. Last fall she was featured in Fronteras 450+ at the Station Museum in Houston, with more work dealing with the controversial topic of the killing of hundreds of women in Cuidad Juarez, Mexico, a border town adjacent to El Paso, Texas, her birthplace. She was also in the opening exhibition at the new Blanton Museum of Art. This year she is in 100 from Texas at the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi.
—Delilah Montoya, associate professor at the University of Houston in Texas and a CWA member
