Bio

Tania Alvarez (b. 1983, Sevilla, Spain) lives and works in Catskill, NY. She holds an MFA (2017) from the New York Academy of Art and a BFA (2005) from Pratt Institute.

Recent solo exhibitions include Through Painted Panes, CHART Gallery, New York, NY (2024); and P.O.V., Miriam Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2020). Recent group exhibitions include Left Unsaid, Hashimoto Contemporary, New York, NY (2025); Inherent Nature, Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole, WY (2025); The Golden Thread: A Fiber Art Show, Bravin Lee Programs, New York, NY (2024); P(re)view, Galeria Belard, Lisbon, Portugal (2023); Interlude: A Five-Year Residency Retrospective, The James Castle House, Boise, ID (2023); Dwelling, White Columns, New York, NY (2023); Inside Out, Scroll Gallery, New York, NY (2022); and Rostro, Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2022), among others.

She is a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, an Edward F. Albee Foundation Fellow, and an artist-in-residence at The James Castle House, Boise, ID; The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation, New Berlin, NY; The Studios at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China. Alvarez's works are in the permanent collections of the University Art Museum at the University at Albany and the Boise City Department of Arts and History.

__________________________________________________

I am currently renovating a 19th-century farmhouse in upstate New York. The crumbling facades, the layers of wallpaper from families I'll never know, the way a house holds a history it can't quite speak, all of it feeds directly into what I'm making.

My practice moves across painting, sewn works on paper, and soft sculpture. The materials come from my own life: salvaged wallpaper, fabric, food packaging, things saved rather than thrown away. I think of the home and the body as the same thing: porous, impermanent, shaped by everyone who has ever passed through. My work tracks memory the way a house tracks time, through the evidence left behind.

I was born in Spain and grew up in America, never fully arriving in either place. That feeling of standing at a threshold, of being both inside and outside something at once, has shaped this work for over twenty years. For someone who has spent a lifetime between places, that disorientation feels like the most honest thing I can make.