Lisa Alvarado

The Kitchen presents Lisa Alvarado: Shape of Artifact Time. Throughout her work, the artist draws from American muralism, music, weaving, and her family’s history as Mexican-Americans in the south Texas region. In her first solo institutional exhibition in New York City, she turns these elements toward an exploration of space and light, creating an environment that considers metaphors and poetics between vibration, assemblage, and translation. Alvarado collaborates as a visual artist and musician with the ensemble Natural Information Society (members include Joshua Abrams, Lisa Alvarado, Mikel Patrick Avery, and Jason Stein); together, they have conceived a site-specific performance for the exhibition.

In Shape of Artifact Time, Alvarado works with the architecture of The Kitchen’s loft space at Westbeth to evoke cultural in-betweenness—inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of Nepantla, which the influential scholar and writer describes as “the midway point between the conscious and the unconscious, the place where transformations are enacted.” Simultaneously, the overlap of materials in her new sewn works connects to Chicano theorist Tomás Ybarra-Frausto's writing on the Mexican-American assemblage aesthetic rasquache, furthering her own investigation into transitory and migratory considerations of liminal space.

The exhibition features two series of sewn works. The first includes five free-hanging paintings, latticed by metallic-painted fabric trim that varies in light, creating depth and shadow that intertwines with the painted surface. The overlapping materials mimic the act of mending, showing the visual conjoining of disparate parts that reveal slow healing or repair over time. A second set comprises four textile works made from strips of translucent dyed natural linen that create a soft floating intersection in the space. Specifically conceived for The Kitchen’s loft at Westbeth, this new series positions contrasting colors as a reference to opposites in a cycle of circular time. These two sets of works also demarcate the perimeter of the performance area.

With the largest painted two works mirroring each other—one with an ascending composition and the other has a descending composition—the artist considers time and transformation through the constant exchange of opposites in nature. The sewn fringe’s pattern atop the paintings structure the timing and rhythm of these works, their raised textural surfaces invoking fossils, rocks, and topography—surfaces that hold impressions of time. The fabrics, many found on Alvarado’s art and music trips, themselves hail from different locations and decades, bringing the works closer to the geologic and the idea of surfaces bearing the impressions of time.

“When I began sewing accumulations of found fabrics into my work and conjoined them together by saturating it all with paint, I felt that this process recalled rasquache—a Mexican American (Chicano) aesthetic in San Antonio, where I am from,” explains Alvarado. “Growing up I saw family members renew their kitchen cabinets, furniture, and outside walls with layers of house paint that also covered the door knobs and any hanging fixtures or mementos. The paint was not intended to keep the original texture, or color. It was not done to look imperceptible or to mask a small imperfection, it was done to completely transform; make a big change that could be seen and felt in an everyday living space, to quickly renew and have a spirited ownership of space and territory. To enliven through an act of one’s hand.”

Lisa Alvarado (b. 1982, San Antonio, TX) is an artist and musician based in Chicago. Her practice gravitates towards creative traditions of overcoming and exuberant forms of resilience. She plays harmonium in the band Natural Information Society and uses her free-hanging paintings as mobile stage sets for their performances. Alvarado’s perspective is rooted in the under-represented American history of the Chicanx/ Mexican American diaspora. Her recent solo exhibitions include Spiral Yellow at The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2024); Spinning Echo at Bridget Donahue, New York (2023); Lisa Alvarado / MATRIX 192 at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford (2023); Pulse Meridian Foliation at RedCat, Los Angeles (2023). She has been included in the recent group exhibitions Resonant Earth at the Moody Center for the Arts, Houston (2024); Calling at Kunstverein Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2023); Contemporary Cartographies at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville (2023); File Under Freedom at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2022); Whitney Biennial: Quiet As It’s Kept at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022). Alvarado played harmonium on ten albums released on Eremite, Aguirre, and Drag City records. She has recently performed at Inhotim Museum, Brazil (2024); Knockdown Center, New York (2024); Le Guess Who Festival, Utrecht (2023); Jazzfest Berlin, Germany (2023); Pioneer Works, New York (2023); Jazz em Agosto, Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (2023); Jazztopad, Poland (2022); Vision Festival, New York (2022); Pitchfork Music Festival, Chicago (2022).