Lisa Alvarado.
Charlie Gross
When visual artist Lisa Alvarado seeks inspiration, she’s inevitably drawn back to her grandmother’s house on the South Side of San Antonio, where she spent much of her childhood. Painted in glowing pastels and smelling of botanica candles, the home had an outsized impact on her life and work. “My
welita created colorful laces and stitched fabrics that were wrapped upon all of her surfaces: tables, pillows, couches, and all changed out frequently,” Alvarado says via Zoom from her home studio this past winter. Not that it’s easy to tell it’s her painting studio, as there’s nothing but bare walls behind her. You’d think she was in the process of moving, empty as it is. But after she spent a feverish few weeks finishing preparations for her first U.K. solo exhibition, which ran from February to April at Glasgow’s Modern Institute, her latest works have all been packed up by movers and shipped across the Atlantic. The sun-bright colors a