The Brooklyn Rail

Lisa Alvarado is an artist and musician based in Chicago. Her practice gravitates towards creative traditions of overcoming and exuberant forms of resilience. Her perspective is rooted in the underrepresented American history of the Chicanx/Mexican American diaspora. She plays harmonium in the band Natural Information Society and uses her free-hanging paintings as mobile stage sets for their performances. She spoke with Ksenia M. Soboleva on the New Social Environment (episode 1177). In the conversation that follows they discuss the role of functionality in Alvarado’s practice, how the artist embraced the concept of rasquache, and her deep appreciation for the intersection of visual and sonic forms.

Ksenia M. Soboleva (Rail): I’m so excited to speak with you today. I had the pleasure of witnessing your show and performance on Friday—the last day of February—which was beautifully done with the Natural Information Society during sunset in the magnificent space that is the temporary Kitchen. As I was sitting there, and the sun was leaving, and the light was shifting, and your work was creating all these different patterns in the space, I gained a new understanding of what you mean when you refer to your work as “vibrational aesthetics,” because both the visual and the sonic landscapes were creating movement in the space. I wanted to start by asking how you first became interested in this relationship between sound and the visual.

Lisa Alvarado: The works in the show are from an ongoing series of free-hanging pieces that I’ve been using as stage-settings for Natural Information Society, thinking about making inclusive space, but also about textiles and liminality and transformation. The series started when I switched from working on stretchers to free-hanging paintings. It arrived at a time when I was done with school and I went back home to San Antonio, Texas. I noticed the visual objects that had always been around me, the landscape, and how they had an influence on what I was making.

But yet, I didn’t think of any of those objects or histories as art forms, and I realized that I wasn’t taught anything about the visual history of the area in school. And the art canon—basically European art history—that I had been taught left out objects that had functionality. In particular, I noticed the abundance of textiles, like serapes that are all over the restaurants in San Antonio, or worn as a poncho by my mom in the winter, or folded on the side of a chair, or a bed in a family home—I was always seeing these textiles, and I really didn’t think of them as an art form.

So at that time, I started to think about functionality, and how these limitations of categorization leave out so many visual objects, so many histories and people. And I wanted my work to connect further with functionality. At that time, like 2009 or 2010, I started to work on free-hanging canvas. The stretcher was bulky, and it was challenging for me to even create the stretchers without access to a wood shop. I felt a certain freedom working on unstretched canvas. I could make the piece any size and it could be more immersive. I could take the painting off the wall and roll it up and put it away. I could unroll them and bring them into any situation, any room, any time. I wanted to connect further to textiles and those histories that they recall. I began to understand textile as a more inclusive historical framework that I, as a Mexican American artist, could fit into and connect more to the histories I'm coming from.

Also at that time I was living in a very musical household. My partner was making soundtracks and working in several different bands. We were collaborating on music. We would do recordings and have rehearsals in our home. And I started to see that musical life bridging into the work that I was making. I would see people walk or play in front of the paintings in rehearsals. I started to see the work with a community of people.

Since I can remember, everything I make has a rhythm or movement and pulse, even if I didn’t understand where that was coming from when I was a younger artist. And maybe I questioned that: “Why does it always need to have this motion?” I think it was something that I paid attention to a lot as a child, that I gravitated towards, and at some point I understood that movement was a part of my language. That’s the way that I express what I make. And so I became aware of these relationships in my work, between sound and movement and vibration, but also in textiles—learning about textiles and thinking about how they can be forms and expressions that talk about time, and have cycles and repetitions, like the day-night cycle, or the cycles between years, or menstrual cycles, or moon cycles, these repeating opposites that are always in relationship.

So those notions of cycles of time, sound, textiles—they all started to come together in my work. And I was embracing that liminal space of textiles, that in-between sort of space of uncertainty. What is it? What does it mean to make pieces that are talking about artifacts? And I wanted to use them within my life and connect to functionality. I didn’t want to wait for an invitation or anything. I just wanted to take the work with us, and I started to bring them to music venues and put them into the space of the performance. That was really exciting, because the work started to gain these layers of history and experience through being a part of that community and absorbing the history of those moments of time. I started to see them as environments, creating spaces where people could be within this transient zone. You could roll it up and unroll it in any space, and they could bring you to some kind of different, imagined place.

Rail: This idea of the liminal space is something that you return to, and the gesture of suspending your works at The Kitchen from the ceiling challenges painting’s traditional position on the wall, and surely affects the viewer’s physical awareness and interaction with the work. I remember seeing your works from the series “Vibratory Cartography: Nepantla” (2021–22) at the Whitney Biennial in 2022, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the title of those pieces referenced in-betweenness. I’m curious how this in-betweenness, this liminal space, shows up differently when you work across different media? How did this idea of in-betweenness show up in your life? To me, it relates to the migrant experience of being in between countries, in between communities, in between traditions.

Alvarado: I’ve always been interested in nature. I remember as a little kid I was obsessed with knowing how the night turned into day. I knew how the day turned into night, but I didn’t know how it happened on the other end. I used to try to force myself to wake up at different times, and sometimes I would wake up too early and be waiting around, and other times I would wake up too late. But I remember once I found out that it was the same thing as the sunset, just in reverse—that was so exciting to me, and I became really interested in that transient moment where the daylight and the night meet and touch, and you have all the gradations of colors coexisting and visible in one moment.

So I think that in-betweenness, where two opposites or differences touch and meet, has always been interesting to me—within nature, but also as a cultural experience. A lot of time in school, teachers and different people didn’t really understand what I was going through, or what I was talking about. And over time, I started relating that to the experience of invisibility. I always heard certain stories from my father of the past.

That’s one aspect of the photos that are in the show. They come from my mother’s photo archive. They’re from around the time of Mexican Repatriation, which was 1929–36. It was a huge mass deportation, mainly of people of Mexican descent. My family on both sides lived in the South Texas area since before Texas was annexed into the US. So they were US citizens. However, my dad’s family was deported at that time, and it may have been because they had a little farm. So they had to leave everything and live in Mexico, only to be solicited a few years later to come back and work in the US as migrant farm laborers under the Bracero Program, which was a labor program that started in 1942, and was ultimately an exploitative scam. Growing up I heard my father’s stories about being a child, traveling from one place to another, having to pick cotton and fruit, making little to nothing.

Rail: How do you navigate representing this historical trauma in the present moment and the current state of US politics?

Alvarado: In particular within the photos, and in general within the show, I was thinking about the experience of liminality, the layers of memory and time and how they live within us. How we recall them in segments, like the layers within the ground or the changing light. I made the photo works in a double image and color composition, relating to how time and memory is recalled in several layers at once.

I wanted to show evidence of people of Mexican descent as Americans living in the United States at that moment in history, having families and homes and practices. I wanted to relate to the shifting light in the Westbeth Gallery, how it’s always moving, always changing. Its transitory shadows and shapes project onto the works and onto the ground, and at certain hours reach the back wall of the photos and their reflective surfaces.

I used translucent fabrics to create soft intersections in the space to think about a physical liminality and in-betweenness. The fabric intersections are made of sewed strips of dyed linen that allow light to shine through and illuminate the colors of the fabrics. The window design also intersects with the incoming light. The sharp, spine-like, diamond shapes of the design are positioned in the middle of each window, and project light throughout the day. Its shapes are constantly shifting—where it’s intersecting, where it’s coming from, how long the shadows are—depending on the time of day, the season, and the weather. So I was seeing the interplay of the changing light with the works as other forms that explore the experience of liminality and memory.

Rail: Did you study the light before installing the work? I’m wondering if the way the light fell and moved through the space then informed the installation.

Alvarado: I noticed it when I visited, and then seeing images of the room, the shadows looked completely different each time from what I remembered and what I photographed. I knew that it would always have a transient quality. The architecture of the outside of the building has a roundness, and I could see round shadows everywhere in the space. I’ve never created a window design before, so it was a completely new step for me, and I’m happy with how it turned out. The shadows and the light change throughout the day. Sometimes they reflect on the backs of the works. Sometimes the light would go all the way to the back wall. It was like everything was touching and being projected onto each other, and that’s really interesting to me.

Rail: It is wonderful hearing you talk about this curiosity you had of how night becomes day. I grew up in northern Russia, and we used to have white nights, when it never fully got dark. I remember being so fascinated by that as a kid, and feeling like I was cheating time; which brings me to the title of the exhibition and this body of work, Shape of Artifact Time. How did you arrive at this title?

Alvarado: I was thinking about the light that comes into the space. And I was thinking about the changing shapes that the light projects over the day as time-shapes, something that comes from the outside in, and I was also thinking about other kinds of time-shapes that happen on a slower scale, not just a day and night cycle, but over a generational cycle within the ground.

So I started to think about the opposite of shapes that come from the outside in, like the light, to shapes that come from the inside out—time-shapes that come from within outward. I was thinking about those kinds of inner transformations and the movement that happens from within. The two largest paintings have a mirroring composition. One is ascending, and the other one is descending. They also demarcate the space of the performance.

In these pieces, I’ve been working with a new process of sewing directly into the works. All the patterning has a sewn lattice made of trims, fabrics, and fringes that I’ve been collecting. I’ve been sewing fabrics onto the edges of the works for years; however, now I’m sewing throughout the surface of the work. I enjoy unearthing antique or hand-sewn fabrics from thrift shops. I’ve been accumulating these pieces, and I wanted to bring them further into the work. So I sew directly into the composition of the pieces, and then I paint on top of them, and that creates forms like fossils, or the texture of rocks. And I was thinking about time-shapes and how time leaves its impression on materiality as forms of change.

Once I started sewing the fabrics together and painting on top, I also started to recall the notion of rasquache, which also connects to the histories within the photos. I wanted to elaborate more on concepts that have been around my life experience, that I know are internalized and within my approach to painting. So rasquache, which comes from the Spanish word for “leftover,” started as a negative term inside of the culture, where people would demean each other based on their aesthetic choices, how one assembles accumulated objects together in different contexts—outside of the home, inside of the home or car. And it was a way to say that somebody had bad taste, or was lower class in some way.

In 1989 Tomás Ybarra-Frausto wrote an essay about rasquache, “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility.” He also grew up in San Antonio. When I heard him speak about rasquache, he said that he was inspired by a restaurant called Mi Tierra and its decoration and colors. I have gone to Mi Tierra countless times as a child and an adult. He wrote about it as a makeshift survivalist aesthetic of reusing things in different contexts, creating new juxtapositions and hybrids through addition, with an unrestrained approach to color and boldness. It’s one of those interesting terms that started out as negative, and then later became embraced and reclaimed.

I’m interested in that kind of transformation of different concepts that usually start as a way to point out a particularity within a people upon themselves that might be negative in meaning—used to impede creativity or motion or movement or the flow of energy, that gets someone stuck in a certain self-negativity—and then at some point there’s a change. I love that sort of alchemy of opposites, how one thing can mirror into its complete opposite and change into something that creates movement and motion and imagination and growth and self-love and self-care.

I’ve been thinking about how to write about that process and I’ve been connecting it to the processes of metamorphic recrystallization that happen within the ground. I’ve been calling it “Recrystallized Energetics,” when something that has a static and negative form then transforms into something that creates movement, motion, and energy. So yeah, I gravitated towards this idea of rasquache as a way that people can renew their living space and create change in their territory and their environment, and have an ownership over that, and feel that it reflects more of their own history and vibe versus some kind of Home Depot or KB Home feeling.

Rail: For me, it highlights how people exist across different value systems. I know that your grandmother was a seamstress. My great aunt, who I lived with as a child, was also a seamstress, and I remember that any scrap of fabric left would never be thrown away. It would be sewn together into, say, a tea towel. When I moved to the Netherlands later on, these things were thrown away. And I realized I was now in a country where most people existed in an entirely different value system, and that there was a hierarchy of whose value systems should be prioritized as being more valid or “successful.”

Alvarado: There seems to be this overarching one system of values you’re supposed to have, but it can be empowering to break out of that and feel out where you want to be and how you want to approach things.

Rail: Even in terms of textile now being considered a fine art, and noticing certain art critics’ discomfort that the traditional value systems of the art world—which prioritizes painting and sculpture—are changing. Much of that is wrapped into a backlash against identity politics, exemplified by Dean Kissick’s controversial piece in Harper’s, which basically implies that identity politics has made contemporary art boring. But there’s always been lots of boring art, and much of it dealt with identity. It’s just that historically, that identity was white and male.

Alvarado: Right, something that was outside becomes inside, and vice versa. I always saw that growing up and as a young artist, some people would put others down if they were not coming from the same European canon, or if in their work they were speaking too much about their family or their history or their identity. And it always would strike me that they believed, somehow, that what they were creating had nothing to do with their identity. And when I would look at their work or read their writing, it was obviously coming from certain histories and certain roots, certain ways of growing up, certain structures that are coming from this overarching American, white, European type of identity. I think it’s hard for people to understand, because that identity can seem seamless and invisible within everything.

Rail: Critiquing works for being overtly underpinned by personal identity is often just a way to shut down artists from marginalized communities who are trying to tell their story.

Alvarado: I think it’s hard to escape that. There’s always going to be somewhat of a personal narrative within what someone makes. I think trying to extract an artwork outside of life, or outside of somebody’s roots—it’s just not the way everything works. There’s so many multiplicities in what anyone makes, as simple as it may be.

Rail: What really resonates for me in your work is how abstraction offers this potential to capture experience in a way that representation sometimes limits—how it can embody more abstract memories. Because as time goes on, our memories become more abstract. It’s sometimes difficult to reconstruct them in a representational manner. In terms of color, is your use of it intuitive, or are the colors you choose rooted in the historical patterns and compositions that you reference?

Alvarado: I’ve always been into color. Maybe it’s the light and that energy that comes from color. I used to try to not believe that was essential. When anyone would say, “Oh, you’re very colorful,” I would respond, “No, no, it’s not about color.” But then I started to give myself more permission when I was done with school to allow myself to explore my sense of color. There is this thing that I have with color, so it is very intuitive. For me it does seem like it comes from an intensity of energy, like the way some bugs fly into the light—it has this sort of light energy. And at certain times I really embrace the bright colors, using the pieces as environments or as backdrops in the performances as a way to be seen at a distance, transform with a different light than what’s in the music venue, and have that sort of visual or vibrational analog to the sound that’s going on in the performance. So I gravitate towards color, and I think a lot about how sound and color interact. I think it’s part of my language structure when I make things.

Rail: You’ve mentioned the pieces being a backdrop to the performances. I wonder, would you ever think of the performances as being backdrops for the pieces?

Alvarado: It could be, because of that experience—you’re listening and you’re looking—but I’ve always thought of them as creating a physical space, so I guess that’s where the backdrop came from. At some point, I stopped referring to them as backdrops, and I started saying they accompany the music. I have used them on the floor in some performances, especially outdoor performances where there was no way to hook them to anything. I just put them right on the ground. As long as they’re here and with us, and gathering and absorbing that experience and that history and those vibrations of that particular moment, that's what matters.

I like switching perspectives of what comes first, or what comes second. One of the ways I started working on the back of them, was to ask, “Why should there be one front or one back?” So I started to add fabrics on the back, and silkscreens. And then in the new works, I’ve let the stitching be seen on the backs. And I’ve painted some of the string, and then I added some hooks at the top of the bar, to hang small collages of fabrics. I also sewed little mirrors and bells on strips that I connected to the back. So, yeah, I like these inversions: What’s the front? What’s the back? What’s the foreground? What comes first? I like how they can switch.

Rail: I loved focusing on the pieces during the performance—the sound became the backdrop for me. I really wanted to get up and walk around and touch the pieces. And that makes me wonder what role tactility plays in the work. Because obviously you’re engaging with the work physically. But would you welcome viewers to touch it? Some of the works are accessible to touch, in terms of their positioning, while others are too high. How do you think about that?

Alvarado: I like the idea of touch. I’ve always liked the idea of Braille, and how some kind of physical texture can give you an idea of meaning. I’ve always been fascinated with the vinyl album and how it has these grooves, and how at some point, people figured out how to make these grooves so that we could put a sharp needle on there, and spin it, and hear recorded sounds. I think there’s a lot to explore there. I think our digitized life might take us away from these tactile possibilities. There’s probably so many other ways in which we can embed memory and experience into objects, or translate sound into a texture, which then we could read through our body.

Rail: I always think about that, the record and the needle, and I never understood how that works. It’s so incredible. Somehow I understand how a digital audio file works better than the physical record.

Alvarado: Yeah, it’s so mysterious. To think our technology could have kept going textural. Now we’re pushed to a kind of anti-textural. Maybe we’ll go back to that.

Rail: You know, I’m sensing a return to the analog. I feel like people are starting to buy analog cameras again. People are slowly leaving social media. I see more of my students keeping notebooks, and their excitement about physical engagement, just being in the classroom instead of being on Zoom.

Alvarado: I know what you mean. It’s definitely something that’s encroaching more on our sense of time and relationship to the physical world, to materiality, to using our hands, to being with people. When I started making these pieces that were so large in my studio and took a lot of time, I liked the idea that I could get away from my computer. I could get away from flat, digital surfaces and work with my hands, get into materiality. I liked getting into that connection between when you’re thinking and you’re remembering and you’re doing—working on something with your hands at the same time—and how you can form different relationships between your memory, your day, your whole sense of time through tactility. I also wanted the pieces to be used in real life gatherings. I was so happy with the idea that you have to be around them to activate them. You need to really experience what they are. That kind of scale doesn’t translate without having a physical experience in the space. It’s lost in a virtual environment. But I agree, I think people are noticing that more and more: how our ownership of our sense of time, how we navigate, how we relate to one another—it doesn’t need to happen so much on the little screens of our phones.

Rail: I can’t wait to spend more time with the work. I’m bringing my students in April.

Alvarado: Oh, that’s wonderful. I’m so glad.

Rail: My last question, Lisa: what are you most excited about? I hope you’re going to get some rest after this big project.

Alvarado: I’m doing a residency at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia, which is an amazing place. I’m really excited about that. I have an upcoming solo exhibition that opens this October at the Joslyn Museum in Omaha. And Natural Information Society is going to play at the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Chicago with some Stan Brakhage films. So we’re working on some new music, different approaches to playing with the films and with paint that’s moving. There’s a lot to look forward to.

I’m going to be back in the show on the last day, April 12. We’re going to do a family event, where me and Joshua are going to play duo, and kids can run wild and dance and anyone can come. It will be an afternoon program. So I’m really looking forward to being back and experiencing the show again, and connecting with everyone at The Kitchen. They were so brilliant and welcoming to work with. There’s something about The Kitchen that’s the perfect space for my work, being a place that has such an art and musical history, with a deep awareness of how to treat both the sonic and visual, and a desire to bring both of those experiences together.