Cecilia Alvarez : Reviews

 

"Cecilia Alvarez's art comforts those that need comforting and confronts those that need confronting."

—Gail Tremblay, artist/poet.

 

Latinas in the United States, A Historical Encyclopedia| 2006

Concepción Alvarez, Cecilia

By Marylou Gómez

 

A dynamic self-taught artist, Cecilia is a Cuban- Mexican- American born to Jorge Guillermo Alvarez and Cecilia Alejandra Diego de Alvarez in National City, California. She was raised on the San Diego-Tijuana border and eventually attended San Diego State University where she pursued a degree in Sociology. At the age of 23, however, Alvarez quit school in order to help support her family. Eventually, Alvarez moved to Canada where the spatial distance from her community provided her the ambient to begin to think freely. According to Alvarez, this experience allowed her to see racism in a different light and to grow as an individual.

As an artist, Alvarez's work is centered on family in a symbolic sense that discusses issues in both her life and the world. Her use of female images transcends the literal meaning of gender to portray the aspects of life that are considered inferior or less important in an industrial consumer society. Female perspectives on the symbolic things we give up to survive such as culture, earth, are those aspects that are unfortunately given female attributes. Examining the female form in Alvarez's work demonstrates that she is essentially redefining femininity. In the piece La Malinche Tenia Sus Razones Alvarez portrays Malinche, Cortez' indigenous concubine, as a remorseful heroine. Another factor in the imagery used reflects aspects of Alvarez' upbringing in the San Diego area where the proximity to Mexico and the influxes of migration constantly creates political unrest and cultural shifts. Alvarez explains that growing up in the San Diego-Tijuana area she quickly learned that people relegate family, culture, and qualities that are considered weaker, and that when these are sacrificed they become commodified. In this way, her work is a visual discourse on reality and the changes of humanity within a collective society. As an artist, Alvarez, attempts to redefine beauty, power, and importance from the context of cultural values: "Without dreams of beauty, of power -there is no reason to live."

La Tierra Santa, Las Cuatas Diego, and El Eterno Damon del Sueno de la Unidad exemplify Alzarez's use of culture, often depicted as family figures or indigenous figures, and the Earth, represented by flowers or animals. The use of family figures and the earth are an important aspect in her art as they embody her ideas on the preservation of culture and community. Beyond the aesthetic qualities of her art, Alvarez's artistic strength lies within her ability to incorporate the observer into a dialogue of current social issues within the context of culture. Si Te Puede Pasar a Ti, EL SIDA is perhaps the best example of this capacity. This piece utilizes the image of the skeleton to demonstrate the inevitable, yet her use of the woman with the condom illustratesthe power that we hold to avoid destruction through sexually transmitted diseases, such as AIDS. Through the process of immersing the observer into a discussion on power and social issues, Alvarez invites introspection about personal biases, hate and prejudice.

Alvarez aims to help youth understand the complex world that they live in so that they may grow to be healthy individuals.She feels that her upbringing in the San Diego area and her subsequent residence in Canada have allowed her to become a free thinker. Alvarez also believes that to achieve dynamic changes in the community we must educate ourselves.

Cecilia Concepcion Alvarez is married and a proud mother of two. Among her achievements, she lists being blessed with the opportunity to articulate through her art what is important to her community locally, nationally, and internationally. Her work has been featured in many books and several international art shows.

—Marylou Gómez

BIBLIOGRAPHY Beardsley, John and Jane Livingston. Hispanic Art In the United States. New York: Abbeville Press. 1987; Del Castillo, Richard G., Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro- Bejarano, ed. Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985; Oral History Interview, March 24, 2001 with Marylou Gomez; Quirate, Jacinto. Mexican American Artists. Austin: University of Texas Press.

 

 

Washington Women and Their Art| 1992

Cecilia Alvarez, Oil/Acrylic

Text: P. Hartwig/Photo: S.Valencia

 

Growing up in the nebulous world between two countries, Mexico and the United States, Cecilia Concepcion Alvarez learned early that art was a way for her to process the inequities with which she lived.

Although Alvarez went to school in San Diego, her social life was in Mexico. "I was very well anchored in that scene," she says of her life in Mexico, admitting that movement between the two worlds was difficult because of the different values. "And so there was a real schism there; a real contrast. But I am grateful for that experience because it allows me to see things in ways that others can't.

"I really didn't start learning English until I went to an integrated school." She was forced to sit in classrooms with teachers who couldn't speak Spanish. She flunked kindergarten, learning early the politics of race and gender.

She remembers being lectured to about hygiene on one side of the classroom with other Mexican children while on the other side white children did art. Those tensions actually accelerated throughout high school," she says, noting that she realized later that it was easier for the white children to make themselves feel superior by downgrading others. "I explored that in my art work intellectually - how people justify that in order to gain power you have to feel superior to someone.

"When you're female and a person of color, you know there's no place for you in the mainstream," she says, noting that one of her motivations for doing art was to have a voice. "All the processes that I saw that were basically demeaning were to silence us. The whole method or formula for success is to strip you of your language, your values, your culture.

"I can see all artists reclaiming that which we are supposed to do, which is to validate reality. We are here to reclaim art and create beauty. The real avant garde is being ignored. I see the business of art as less and less art and more and more like Wall Street. It has more to do with power, not making any statement and catering to an elite class. You can create anything. You can fabricate history or reality."

Included in the artist's responsibility is her depiction of women. Alvarez believes that many artists show rebel women - images that are those of male power. "They basically use the woman as a prop. I began using female images as they were. They're like my own versions of saints," Alvarez says of her oil paintings on canvas of women giving without thought and many times going unacknowledged. "A lot of what success is today in America is that you don't do anything unless you're going to get something back. "I have a lot of images that are really quite beautiful." Reacting to the Barbie doll sense of beauty, she is not afraid to express beauty in how women really look - sometimes over- weight and dark skinned with strong features.

In Los Eternos Sacrificios, (The Eternal Sacrifices) she paints a seven-foot crucified woman. But this is not the typical crucifixion, she says, noting that the woman's legs are crucified but open, with an embryo between them. This is her altar to "certain people who are more expendable. People who are not valuable to society and therefore who are invisible are sacrificed." Noting that she grew up believing that each person is their own universe, Alvarez says, "All humans are important; this planet is important. How can you negate all those universes?"

—Washington Women and Their Art, 1992

 

Skagit Valley Herald, date?

Making her point

Art intended to provoke people into discussion

By Peter Kelley
Staff Writer

Cecelia Alvarez knows her artwork may raise eyebrows, but she hopes c its greater effect will be to raise awareness.

"Better Living Through Chemistry," a large, three-dimensional piece now on display in Skagit Valley College's Foundation Gallery, incorporates Catholic and pre- Columbian imagery, Alvarez says, to symbolically comment on our embrace of chemical and other technology. This piece takes its title from 1950s era advertisements that boasted boundless power of technology, it was actually a PR ad quote that a chemical corporation used to tell about how we're going to fix all human ailments - and in fact (such chemicals) have created them."

Its dark vision of a woman giving birth in the furrows of a field. Alvarez says, is symbolic both of fertility and our agricultural use of toxic pesticides.

“The use of gold skulls refers to the anonymous people who have been sacrificed for the massive profit of a few, and that we are all expendable in that chemical equation,” Alvarez says. "Instead of life, we're giving birth to death. And instead of food and nutrients, the field gives us a crop of death."

The "inappropriate technology" we have become accustomed to using in agriculture, she says, "has created a lot of problems, and we were hoping we'd have the technological advancement at this point to fix it, but part of the equation is that certain people are expendable - farm workers and farmers. Those closest to the soil are permeated with very toxic and harmful chemical."

 A Seattle resident whose father is Cuban and mother is Mexican; Alvarez says the question of pesticide use is close to her heart, since she has lost several family members who were migrant farm workers to cancer. She believes the use of these chemicals is extremely dangerous to the workers who till the soil, but that such dangers tend to be  suppressed in the political world of 'lobbies and special interests, in the United States  and its export power abroad.

"We're exporting DDT all around the world,” Alvarez said. "I've seen it in Mexico, they get sacks of DDT and they go out to put it in the field. These people are spreading it around by hand. People are buying it and dying because of it, and that’s been something we’ve chosen to deny."

And if the image makes some uncomfortable, she says that’s part of the point; she’d like viewers to investigate their reactions, and use that knowledge as a stepping-stone to a better understanding of the work and the larger issue.

Most people's conception of art is, 'Does it go well with my couch?' But art ... can evoke and educate, and effect change. It's part of a larger discourse rather than decoration … What type of future are we giving to those we love, and people we don’t even know?” 

“Better Living Through Chemicals” is a part of a series of activities at SVC, generally titled “A Question of Sacrifice,” exploring the use of pesticides and their effect on farmworkers and agricultural communities. The piece will be on display at the gallery until Feb. 10.

Alvarez says her three-dimensional work uses cultural and religious imagery as well as symbols of money and power to comment on the use of pesticides in agriculture. She says she knows the Images may startle some, but she hopes that leads to a deeper discussion of the issue, which has affected her personally.

—Skagit Valley Herald, date?

 

Ethnic Heritage Council| date?

Artists on Artists #6

Codex Alvarez

By Kathleen Alcala

 

Cecilia Concepcion Alvarez is a Seattle artist whose work has been in over forty shows throughout the United States and Latin America. In 1992, one of her paintings was featured I Art in America. More recently, Codex Chicon Alvarez was included in the show “1492 – 1992” at the Seattle Art Museum. Cecilia grew up in southern and Baja California; I interviewed her by telephone in San Diego, where she was visiting relatives.

I can't recall the time and place I started painting, but my grandmother was a painter, and I spent many hours watching her paint. I had kind of a problem about it, painting seemed so permanent, and I drew for a long time before I started painting. I was probably in my early teens before I started painting, and not until college did I begin to draw and paint seriously, once I started taking myself seriously.

My grandmother, Concepcion Diego, was definitely a formative figure for me. One of my favorite paintings was of an Indian woman drawing water with a jug – it was a female figure very closely tied to nature, all in one. We called it “la pintura de la India,” and it was a little contrived – I think she was dressed like a Navajo—but it was very serene.

As I got older, I was inspired by other women artists, especially those not related to or the lovers of famous male artists. One of my favorite catalogues was of women painters from 1550 – 1950.

One painter I like is Lenore Finni – she was just kind of a wild person. Her art was not just on canvas, but was her life. She was a Surrealist, but painted for mental health reasons. Her art seems more mature, more fully formed, however, than the child-genius types who were her male contemporaries.

Frida Kahlo was instrumental for me to see that women could get documented in macho society. That’s been one of the problems – women were painting, but it was difficult for them to get documented. But I Still had that problem of being not too thrilled that she was related to Diego Rivera – a woman suffering for her man. I also like the photographer Alvarez Bravo.

I’ve always been attracted to images that were pure statements, not formed by a reaction to male power or trying to have a discourse with the dominant society – a singular voice.

I haven’t been motivated just by visual artist, but also by many writers who seemed to reflect a different worldview: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Griela Mistral. I look to them for solace and credibility, for an affirmation of the world, as I know it. Many visual artists seem to be mired, or suck in their epoch, while literature seems more circular, to exist in another continuum. Painting is more a reflection of its time – and that’s important to me, too.

I would describe my work that of an figurative painter. I usually paint females as symbols of culture – that which is devalued by certain societies those things which are given as gifts but become obligations. Also, context means a lot, using a symbology that transcends the decorative. I am interested in power that doesn’t take away from people, but that nurtures. I am also into reality, which tells some of our failings as the advanced creatures we thin we are.

I think that art is political, whether it’s intentional or unintentional. I recently read an editorial in San Francisco newspaper dealing with this subject as it pertains to writers: what one says is political, and what one doesn’t say, or chooses not to say, is also political.

I have found that artist who share my views often censor themselves. Whether we like it or not, we, as painters, still function within patron system. If your art comments on that class that buys art, the bottom line is that your work will not be bought. In a society where money is survival, than you’re not important. How much you make is how important you are. Those that make the most glorify the power structure.

Jeffrey Coons is an example. He was once a junk bond broker. He says very nonsensical things, and takes pride in making art that does not have anything to day. He doesn’t create and of his own 3D work, but sends it off to a foundry. He sent a photograph, and had them reproduce three or four sculptures from it, which sold for thousands of dollars. He was then sued by the photographer, whom he hadn’t given any credit or acknowledgment.

Coons also set up three vacuum cleaners in Plexiglas and called it “Homage to a Housewife” and sold it for thousands of dollars. To me, Coons is the epitome of a con man. Its an anti-intellectual, anti-intellect approach. He gets rewarded for having a macho-penis mentality: “I am so brave.” It takes away from the fact that there are real issues out there; it diffused issues, and takes away fro discourse. I don’t like art that just talks to itself.

My work has been classified as provocative (in a positive sense), but I don’t find it that way. I was at a show in Spokane where my work became the focal point of controversy, but not about the content of the work. Those who didn’t like my work started with a sexual harassment suit, and those supporting me make it an issue of censorship. How can a work of art sexually harass you? USA Today ran an article quoting someone as saying it was Satanism. It’s a pre-Columbian image!

My piece, “Modern Living Through Chemistry.” (which is a three-dimensional representation of a woman giving birth to death in a cultivated field) was dealing with issues of, how a s industrial beings, we are permeated with chemicals, we are just a vast experiment. This series deals with contemporary human sacrifice. Power. That was 1) too esoteric, and 2) my artistic voice calls for some knowledge of a vernacular outside of western culture. It came to be a ridiculous argument.

As women of color, we are heard so seldom, and told to shut up in so many ways. So many times in articles, people of color are often talked about, but not talked to. It’s easier to take about people than to take to them and find out what they are trying to way.

Art is removed from us, we are told that we can’t interpret it intellectually. People often say to me, ‘I don’t know anything about art, but I like what you’re doing.’ Art has always been for the elite. Different movements have come along, but they are always subsidized by the wealthy or elite.

In the future, I hope to be painting more, and not so large, since my studio isn’t that big. Like a writer, you have certain things to say in a certain style, or voice. What I had to say had to be 3D to have these layers. I had always been curious about going beyond the canvas. But some things don’t work in 3D; it takes so much thinking to figure it our. I really like painting, and hope it will remain the nucleus of what I’m saying. I always thought my paintings were 2D alters in themselves, and I like d taking them beyond. But I envision far more painting.

—Northwest Ethnic News

 

 

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