Artist-in-Residence

Lisa Alvarado

The artist Lisa Alvarado, a Chicanx woman with long straight dark hair, smiles next to an arrangement of dyed textiles on a clothesline over a large industrial sink.
Lisa Alvarado, in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, “Talismans for a Theater of Resilience” (Process Image), 2025. Photo credit: Carlos Avendaño.

Artist and musician Lisa Alvarado is known for her large scale free-hanging paintings that function as both artworks and mobile stage sets for musical performances. She creates pulsating works that draw on her Mexican American perspective as well as her interests in vibration and the cyclic rhythms within music, nature, and the body. Her practice bridges visual art and sound to form spaces of collective gathering, while challenging rigid categorizations between Western traditions of abstraction and Mexican textiles.

In her practice, Alvarado draws inspiration from the millennia-old memory embedded within the land and our bodies:

“I consider how memory lives within us, how it’s passed down through the generations, absorbed and inherited. I think about relationships between geography and the body, and consider geologic processes of transformation as a metaphor for the transformative possibilities of memory.”

Talismans for a Theater of Resilience will bring together Alvarado’s interests in space making with new explorations into sculptural fabric assemblage, screenprinting, and dyeing techniques realized through her FWM residency. As part of her research, Alvarado and the FWM Studio team have visited geological collections at educational institutions in Philadelphia to learn more about the history of the land in terms of geological time. Utilizing translucency, sound, color, and natural light to shape atmospheric and spatial dimensions, Alvarado considers how metamorphic cycles within the ground underscore a relationship between vibration, communal space, and resilience.

Art

Artist Bio

American, born 1982, San Antonio, TX. Lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Lisa Alvarado is a visual artist and musician that bridges vibrational forms and reimagines collective space. She works with painting, wall murals, light, sand, sound and musical performance, creating works that engage with abstraction as an ancient and global tradition that precedes European modernism. Alvarado plays harmonium in the band Natural Information Society and uses her free-hanging paintings as mobile stage sets in their performances. Her work has been shown at the Whitney Biennial, New York, NY; The Kitchen, New York, NY; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum, Hartford, CT; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; MOCA, Jacksonville, FL; REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA; Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, TX; Marfa Ballroom, TX; Bergen Kunsthall, Norway; and Kunsthalle Münster, Germany; among others. She has performed at the Pitchfork Music Festival, Chicago, IL; Inhotim Museum, Brazil; Le Guess Who Festival, Utrecht, The Netherlands; Pioneer Works, New York, NY; Palais De Tokyo, Paris, France; and Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal, among others. Alvarado has  recorded on albums released on Eremite, Drag City, and Aguirre Records. Her work is represented by Bridget Donahue in New York and The Modern Institute in Glasgow.