Lisa Alvarado

Lisa Alvarado’s interdisciplinary practice is rooted in cultural tradition and social history. Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, Alvarado is based in Chicago and works as a visual artist and musician with the ensemble Natural Information Society. Alvarado’s paintings and music traverse thresholds of material and conscious experience, revealing new methods to explore notions of memory and time.

Drawing from American muralism, music, woven technologies, and her family’s history as Mexican-Americans in the border region, Alvarado imbues socio-political cues into her suspended abstractions and sonic installations. Alvarado is inspired by the “timing and processes of slow transformation within the ground - transforming minerals, elements, and landscapes.” She calls this pace geologic time and understands these changes as “a metaphor for our internal shifts, such as in how we carry memory, loss, and inherited struggle.”

Her first solo institutional exhibition in New York City, Shape of Artifact Time, explores modes of experience with space and light, creating an environment that considers metaphors and poetics between vibration, assemblage, and translation. The work is inspired by gradual paths of transition — the shifts between sunlight and shadow throughout the day, and the generational movements within the earth metamorphosing and realigning inner and outer landscapes.

Alvarado will debut a series of translucent textile works, with sewn paintings and printed fabric that extend to the ceiling. These expansive works will also feature hand-sewn bells and reflective surfaces. The fabrics within the new work will have an overlapping characteristic that mimics the act of mending, showing the visual conjoining of disparate parts that reveal slow healing or repair over time. The artist sees this new direction of material integration as a means to connect with Chicano theorist Tomás Ybarra-Frausto's writing on rasquache–a Mexican-American makeshift assemblage aesthetic–that furthers her own investigation into transitory and migratory considerations of liminal space. Alvarado will continue her sustained engagement with atmospheric orchestration that involves a multi-channel sound piece specifically created for Shape of Artifact Time and floor-based works that expand the pictorial plane with sand and dried pressed flower works throughout the installation. Alvarado’s ongoing interest in the relationship between interior and exterior space is central to the exhibition. Here, she expands her visual language to the architectural contours of Westbeth’s building with color-based installations across a bank of thirty windows within the exhibition space. In creating this landscape of color and form, Alvarado’s work will be visible from within and outside The Kitchen’s loft. The hues and patterning will thus activate and mediate The Kitchen’s gallery as the sun shines and sets throughout the day. Shape of Artifact Time will also serve as a stage for Alvarado and the Natural Information Society who have conceived a site-specific performance for the exhibition opening and will perform their album Mandatory Reality into the sunset on February 28 and March 1, 2025.

Lisa Alvarado: Shape of Artifact Time is organized by Robyn Farrell, Senior Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs.