Exhibition Dates: January 24 - February 28, 2025
Location: Russell Hill Rogers Galleries
Opening Reception: January 24, 6 pm - 8 pm
Lisa Alvarado: Trace Memory brings together trajectories in modern and contemporary conceptual art and abstraction with popular artistic traditions that welcome viewers to consider personal and shared cultural geographies. Alvarado is a San Antonio native, with an international exhibition record, whose works will attract and inspire audiences in our region. Her works both demonstrate the influence of her Mexican American heritage and everyday contexts of visual culture growing up in South Texas and emphasize the conceptual character of sensory experience in engagement with artistic installation. The exhibition will feature brightly colored paintings on fabrics that are suspended from the ceiling and mixed media works that include early 20th century family photographs documenting Mexican American history. Alvarado’s work proves that abstraction extends beyond elitist modernist contexts and offers dynamic potential for diverse populations. The exhibition also features video performance of the Natural Information Society, whose avant-garde jazz musical performances are in dialogue with Alvarado’s visual art.
Alvarado creates with a range of cultural and conceptual approaches and uses diverse media to animate sensorial experiences, pursuing what she calls a “vibrational aesthetics.” She is inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa’s promotion of the concept of nepantla, a Nahuatl term for “in between” that describes a productive space of conceptual and engaged transformations. Alvarado’s works situate the dynamic experiences of her viewers and of herself as an artist by integrating a broad range of conceptual trajectories that corresponds both to modes of abstraction in “high culture” vocabularies and to energies in historic and popular cultural idioms. The exhibition features work inspired with “visual and sonic abstractions” of music and sound, heartbeat and breath, and embodied renewal. Works emphasize bold colors that pulsate within and beyond an array of geometric patterns, imaginative marks, and spectacular textiles. Alvarado has strong commitments to challenging how elite institutions devalue models of creative productivity that exist in mainstream experiences of visual culture, including mural painting, textiles, and family photos. Her abstract formulations that develop from these references respect her considerations of contexts of discrimination against those with Mexican heritage that both resonate in her own family and in present-day humanitarian crises at and within our national borders. Her works that integrate photography provide opportunity to remember the suffering of the distress and dispossession during the period of Mexican “repatriation” between 1929-36 where many citizens were subject to ethnic cleansing and forcibly moved to Mexico and to contemplate the effects of psychological and cultural trauma on subsequent generations.
