Mexican-American artist Celia Alvarez Munoz creates a special exhibition combining a site-specific installation with a survey of recent work. Munoz draws on her rich Mexican-American heritage to tell "stories" in words and pictures about the most universal but also the most personal themes—identity, gender, family, childhood, language. Explaining that each of her works dictates its own medium, she has produced everything from eleganlty designed boxed books to mixed media installations. What gives Munoz's work its particular edge is her decision to use spareness, formal restraint, and wit to express emotional, often highly-charged subject matter. It is perhaps because of this intriguing contrast between "medium and message" and the obvious need to avoid easy categorizations of her work that she has been compared to an especially diverse range of artists, from Lorna Simpson to Joseph Cornell to Sophie Calle.

Curated by Diana L. Johnson
image: Image from "Which Came First?": Enlightenment #4, 1982