Whitney Biennial 2022: 
Quiet as It’s Kept

Floor 5

Born 1982 in San Antonio, TX
Lives in Chicago, IL

These suspended, abstract paintings map, as Lisa Alvarado has written, a “form of navigation that is attuned to the body’s pulsations and breaths.” Her paintings function as stage sets for musical performances, exploring how sound and color vibration may affect the body. The title Vibratory Cartography: Nepantla suggests states of transition and transformation. Nepantla means “in between” in Nahuatl, an Indigenous language of central Mexico and is a theme of many Chicanx writers including Gloria Anzaldua. Alvarado has described the paintings as “rooted in Mexican American art traditions and the histories that ground them: the textile traditions of the Americas; the complexities of the U.S.-Mexico border; my family’s own experience with migrant farm labor . . . public mural painting; the Chicanx civil rights movement. . . . Existing in the resonant frequencies between worlds, the paintings imagine topographies of interwoven pathways and bridges of regeneration.”