Draft:DL Alvarez

DL Alvarez (born: Darrell-Lynn Alvarez, also known as D-L Alvarez) is a Mexican-American visual artist working in sculpture, prose, performance, film, video, but are best known for their drawings which represent landmark moments in film and history from queer perspectives. Their most written about work is a series of 18 graphite drawings titled The Closet. (2007). These are rendered in a pixelated style and depict sequential stills from the pivotal closet scene in John Carpenter’s 1978 slasher horror film Halloween.

Exhibition History
They frequently work collaboratively and credit this type of process—in which the outcome is unpredictable—as informing even solo projects. “Everything I do has built-in blind spots: parts of the process that incorporate chance or even impossible goals.” (Alvarez interviewed on KUSF radio, December 17th 2011)

Some of the people Alvarez has collaborated with are: the Austrian collective Gelitin, Suzette Partido, Wayne Smith, Nayland Blake, Michelle Rollman, Jennifer Locke, Nao Bustamante, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, and Kevin Killian.

Alvarez's art has shown in the U.S., Europe, London, South Africa, the Soviet Union, and Mexico. Their film work screened in the 48th Venice Biennale, their drawings are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the MoMA in New York, and San Francisco MOMA. In 2012 the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive gave Alvarez their first museum solo-exhibition, Matrix 243

Writing
Their fiction and essays have been published in anthologies including Discontents: New Queer Writers, Virgins Guerrillas and Locas: Gay Latinos Writing about Love, Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients, SLUTS edited by Michelle Tea, and Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, as well as in many journals, zines, and magazines.