Desirée Alvarez

"Botanical Drawing of Colonialism", Ink painting on sheer fabric

2019

STATEMENT I am a painter, fabric artist, printmaker and poet. I use a wide range of drawing, painting and printmaking techniques, including woodcut and drypoint, to create fabric installations. I also make oil paintings on wood. I evoke romance, dream and myth to explore the intricacies of consciousness and human relationship to nature. In my fabric art transparent veils are painted with ink and printed with woodcut to create portable three dimensional installations of imagined mythic natural worlds. The transparency creates subtle color and light shifts, movement, and layering of imagery. Recent work responds to specific location ecologies. My poetry is often an integral element in the visual work. BIOGRAPHY Desirée Alvarez was born, lives and works in New York City. Her strongly observed, poetic works speak of the secret powers and beauty of nature, humans, and animals. Evoking myth, adventure, and romance, she draws, paints and prints on fluid, constantly shifting fabric surfaces. Her work has won numerous awards including the Cork 2005 European Capital of Culture Award, an Urban Artist Initiative grant, two New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship Awards, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Willard L. Metcalf Award. She exhibits widely, nationally and internationally. She has recently exhibited fabric art installations at the International Print Center New York and the Mandeville Gallery in the Nott Memorial. She has been an Artist in residence at P.S. 122 and Yaddo. Alvarez has won awards for her poetry and non-fiction, with poems appearing in Poetry Magazine, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, and Prairie Schooner. She teaches at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. www.desireealvarez.com