The 64th Annual Paul Voertman Juried Student Art Competition & Exhibition starts with a call for entries — and a distinguished juror!

CVAD students — it’s time to showcase your talent and learn about this year's juror. Submit your best work for a chance to exhibit in this iconic juried show. Visit the CVAD Galleries website for important information, dates and the link to submit your artwork.

Learn About This Year's Juror 

Celia Álvarez Muñoz, alumna: 1982, M.F.A., Studio Art: Photography

For many years, Celia Álvarez Muñoz (b. 1937, El Paso, TX; lives in Arlington, TX) has been making conceptually driven works of art, incorporating a wide range of mediums, including texts she has written. Munoz’s works reflect family stories and her bicultural background, having grown up on the Texas border. Additionally, she is known for collaborating with and highlighting the experiences and historical demographic dynamics of populations that have changed over time by natural resources or politics.

A conceptual multimedia artist,  Álvarez Muñoz is known for her photography, painting, installations, public art, and writing. Her work addresses the dichotomy of living between two cultures. Common themes in her practice include Catholicism, the Mexican American experience, the past versus the present and English versus Spanish language. The artist incorporates family and "communal memories" themes" in her pieces. She uses text and images to explore the ambiguous signs and signifiers where cultures meet and to communicate stories of American history, culture, and society.

She studied at Texas Western University (now the University of Texas) in El Paso, starting in commercial art classes and finishing a B.A. in Art and Art Education for K–12. Quickly after that, she began teaching art to children. After relocating several times to different parts of the country before Álvarez Muñoz, her husband, and their two children returned to Arlington, Texas. In 1977, she enrolled in graduate school at then-North Texas State University — now the University of North Texas in Denton.

She took courses with the artists Vernon Fisher (b.1943–d. 2023) and Al Souza (b.1944), who influenced her conceptual practice across mediums, from artist's books and photographs to installations and public works. While attending NTSU, she began work on her series Enlightenment. Enlightenment tapped into her memories of growing up along the Mexican border after the Great Depression and WWII. Deeply committed to her bilingual and bicultural heritage, she plays with text, puns, and double meanings, regularly addressing such themes as cognitive development and language acquisition. Her most recent work continues to relate to the experiences of living in the physical as well as the psychological and political border zone.

Álvarez Muñoz has received numerous awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts grants (1988, 1991) and the Art League Houston Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts. She was among the first cohort to receive the landmark Latinx Artist Fellowship award and was named 2D Artist of 2022 by the Texas Commission for the Arts.

Her work has been exhibited widely in group exhibitions, such as the Whitney Biennial (1991), and solo presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (1991); Dallas Museum of Art (1991); Capp Street Project, San Francisco (1994); and the University of Texas at Arlington (2002). Her work has been acquired by public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Muñoz’s work was included in the invitational traveling exhibition Our Journeys/Our Stories: Portraits of Latino Achievement by the Smithsonian Institution and Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, among other exhibits. A career retrospective was conducted in 2023 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego.

Links

Hammer Museum
Ruiz-Healy Art
Glasstire
San Diego Contemporary Art

Most Recent Works

2024 Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Los Brillantes, Studio at Ruby City, San Antonio, Texas; curator: Elyse A. Gonzales (brochure)

2023-4 Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, California. Traveling to the University Art Museum, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma; curators: Dr. Kate Green and Isabel Casso (catalog)

2022 Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Semejantes Personajes/Significant Personalities, Ruiz-Healy Art, San Antonio, Texas, Caritas y Marcas, Sala Diaz, San Antonio, Texas

2020 Obras, Art League Houston, Houston, Texas; curator: Sarah Beth Wilson (catalog)

Selected Honors and Awards

2022 Texas State 2D Artist, Texas Commission on the Arts

2021 Latinx Artist Fellowship, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation, New York

2020 Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts, Art League Houston, Houston, Texas

2008 Annual Recognition Award, College of Art Association/Committee on Women in the Arts, Dallas

Achievement Award, Hispanic Women’s Network of Texas, Fort Worth, Texas

Selected Group Exhibitions

2024 XICANX: Dreamers + Changemakers | Soñadores + Creadores del Cambio, Contemporary at Blue Star, San Antonio, Texas; curators: Jill Baird and Greta de Léon

2023 International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA), Ruiz-Healy Art, New York, Xican–a.o.x. Body, The Cheech Marin Center, Riverside, CA; curators: Cecilia Fajardo Hill with Marissa Del Toro and Gilbert Vicario (catalog)

2022 Raphael Montañez Ortiz: A Contextual Retrospective, Museo Tamayo, México City; curators: Rodrigo Moura and Julieta Gonzales XICANX: Dreamers + Changemakers| Soñadores + Creadores del Cambio, The MOA, Vancouver, Canada; curators: Jill Baird and Greta de Léon

2017-18 Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; traveling to Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York, and Pinacoteca de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; curators: Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta with Marcela Guerrero, former curatorial fellow, in collaboration with Connie Butler, chief curator, Hammer Museum (catalog)

Selected Public Exhibitions

BarrettCollection, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas

Center for Book Arts, New York

Harvard UniversityHoughton Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

List Art Center, Johnson Collection, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

Selected Museum Collections

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin, Texas

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas

Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, Los Angeles