Candida Alvarez (born 1955) is an American artist and professor, known for her paintings and drawings.Voon, Claire. "Chicago Legend Candida Alvarez Finds Comfort—and Reprieve from Trauma—in Abstraction," ARTnews, March 13, 2020. Retrieved October 10, 2022.Snodgrass, Susan. "Arriving Here: Candida Alvarez," The Seen, Issue 05, 2017. Retrieved November 14, 2022.Waxman, Lori. "Candida Alvarez, Up to Try Anything," Chicago Tribune, August 3, 2017. Retrieved November 14, 2022.
Alvarez has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art,Whitney Museum of American Art. "no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria," Exhibitions. Retrieved November 15, 2022. MoMA PS1,Museum of Modern Art. Candida Alvarez, Artists. Retrieved November 14, 2022. Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago,Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. "The Long Dream," Exhibitions. Retrieved November 15, 2022. and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston,Glentzer, Molly. "'Outside the Lines' opens up a world of abstraction,' Houston Chronicle, November 8, 2013. Retrieved November 14, 2022. Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Whitney,Whitney Museum of American Art. Candida Alvarez, Collection. Retrieved November 14, 2022. Art Institute of Chicago,Art Institute of Chicago. Mary in the Sky With Diamonds, Candida Alvarez, Artworks. Retrieved November 14, 2022. San Jose Museum of Art,San Jose Museum of Art. "Evergreen: Art from the Collection," Exhibitions. Retrieved November 15, 2022. and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Chill, Candida Alvarez, Collection. Retrieved November 14, 2022. among others. She was named a 2022 US Latinx Artist FellowVelie, Elaine. "15 Latinx Artist Fellows Receive $50K Grants," Hyperallergic, May 15, 2022. Retrieved November 14, 2022. and has been recognized by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation,Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Candida Alvarez, Recipients. Retrieved November 14, 2022. Joan Mitchell FoundationJoan Mitchell Foundation. Candida Alvarez, Supported Artists. Retrieved November 14, 2022. and Pollock-Krasner Foundation.Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Candida Alvarez, Artists. Retrieved November 14, 2022. She lives and works in Chicago and Baroda, Michigan and is a professor of painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Education and career Alvarez was born in 1955 in Brooklyn to parents who had arrived from Puerto Rico two years earlier. She grew up in a high-rise building in the Farragut Houses public housing project.Barbara A. MacAdam, "Candida Alvarez, Myth, Memory and Old Lace," ARTnews, February 1993, p. 67.Jones, Kellie. "When Painting Stepped Out to Lunch," Candida Alvarez: Here. A Visual Reader, Chicago: The Green Lantern Press. Retrieved November 15, 2022.Foumberg, Jason. "Candida’s Coloring Book," Chicago Magazine, May 2017, p. 43. Alvarez attended Fordham University at Lincoln Center in New York and received a BA in studio art/liberal arts in 1977; she studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1981. In her early career in New York, she worked as a curator at El Museo del BarrioQuiles, Daniel R. "Numbers and Dreams: Candida Alvarez, 1976–1988," Candida Alvarez: Here. A Visual Reader, Chicago: The Green Lantern Press. Retrieved November 15, 2022. and exhibited in group shows at institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, Studio Museum in Harlem (artist residency) and Jamaica Arts Center.Brooklyn Museum. "Recollections: Works on Paper by Candida Alvarez & Vincent D. Smith," Exhibitions. Retrieved November 14, 2022.Brenson, Michael. "New Visions at Soho20 Gallery," The New York Times, January 9, 1987. Retrieved November 14, 2022. During that time, she had solo shows at Exit Art (1985), Queens Museum (1991), and Bronx Museum of the Arts (1992), among others.Queens Museum. History. Retrieved November 14, 2022.Zimmer, William. "Echoes of Paris in a Montevideo School," The New York Times, January 3, 1993. Retrieved November 14, 2022.
In 1995, she enrolled at the Yale School of Art, studying with Mel Bochner, Rochelle Feinstein and Howardena Pindell.Myers, Terry R. "Recognize," Candida Alvarez: Here. A Visual Reader, Chicago: The Green Lantern Press. Retrieved November 15, 2022. Her studies there set the stage for the playful form of abstraction for which she is known, and culminated in an MFA in 1997. The following year, she accepted a position at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is the F. H. Sellers Professor in Painting. In her later career, Alvarez has been included in major surveys of abstraction ("Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today," Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 2017)Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art". Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. "Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today," Exhibitions. Retrieved November 15, 2022. and Latinx art ("Estamos Bien – La Trienal 20/21," El Museo del Barrio, 2021; "Latinx Abstract," BRIC, 2021; "no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria," Whitney Museum, 2022).Passy, Charles. "El Museo del Barrio Hosts First Triennial Exhibition," The Wall Street Journal, March 2021. Retrieved November 14, 2022.Witt, Bree. "Candida Alvarez Makes Her Mark," News, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Retrieved November 15, 2022. She has had solo exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center (2012), Chicago Cultural Center (2017),Chris Miller, Chris. "Painting A Life In Bloom," New City, July 15, 2017. Retrieved November 14, 2022. GAVLAK Gallery (Palm Beach, 2019; Los Angeles, 2021) and Monique Meloche Gallery (Chicago, 2020), among other venues.
In 2017, six existing color works by Alvarez were adapted by Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo for her "new camouflage" Comme des Garçons haute couture menswear collection.Marevska, Anna. ["Comme des Garçons Spring 2017 Men’s Collection Features a Chicago Artist’s Print,"] Fashion Files, February 1, 2017. Retrieved November 14, 2022.
Work and reception Alvarez reworks both materials and methods in her work, resisting a single visual methodology and disrupting distinctions between abstraction, representation and conceptualism. Her painting synthesizes a wide array of modes: floating color fields, highly structured geometries, subdued figural portraits, text and invisible guiding systems. Critic Susan Snodgrass has described Alvarez’s process as syncretic and belonging "to a strategy of cultural fusion and hybridity that allows passage between different contexts and histories, as does her use of personal narratives and private symbols as markers of identity."
Early work In the 1980s, Alvarez produced largely representational paintings that drew on her city experiences and Puerto Rican heritage, mixing portraiture, landscape, written words and personal iconography.Fusco, Coco. "Hispanic Artists and Other Slurs," The Village Voice, August 9, 1980, p. 22.Cyphers, Peggy. "Candida Alvarez," Arts, February 1990, p. 100. She often portrayed family members; He loved to dream (1985) was a mixed-mode work of flat planes, sharp angles and relief imagery depicting her father.Pacheco, Patrick. "The New Faith in Painting," Art & Antiques, May 1991, p. 61–2. Paintings such as the three-panel, altar-piece-like work, Sit, Stand & Kneel (1986) or Soy Boricua (I am Puerto Rican) (1989) portrayed passive, dutiful, wary or increasingly powerful female protagonists as they navigated roles and identities. Critics characterized these color- and imagery-laden revelations of self and traditional family life as introspective, moody, emotionally charged and reminiscent of magic realism, naïve art or confessional poetry; Arts Magazine'''s Peggy Cyphers likened them to the art of Marc Chagall and Paul Klee.
In subsequent work, Alvarez experimented with new mixed-media materials, textures and multi-panel formats that functioned as both structural and narrative devices. Her solo exhibitions at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (1992) and New Britain Museum of American Art (1996) featured multi-image paintings of rudimentary human forms and abstract primal energies that evoked themes of organic or inner growth.Cotter, Holland. "Candida Alvarez, Bronx Museum of the Arts," The New York Times, December 18, 1992, p. C37. Retrieved November 14, 2022.Zimmer, William. "Sculpture of Large Gestures And a Sense of Place," The New York Times, June 16, 1996. Retrieved November 14, 2022. New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote that the " lyrical, painterly work" charted progress "from darkness to light and from fragmentation to wholeness," drawing strength from its ambiguity regarding the relationships between human figures and natural forces. The panels hinted at sequential, internal passages while also serving as external, quasi-architectural spaces, alluding to the 14th-floor housing-project windows she looked out of as a child (e.g., Sisters I and Sisters 2, 1992; Sixteen Stories, 1996). This work presaged her later interest in minimalist seriality and gestural abstraction.
Later work During her time at Yale, Alvarez studied color theory and began experimenting with intuitive processes, puzzles and games, in part influenced by her friendship with the minimalist and conceptual artist Sol LeWitt. These strategies pushed her work toward abstraction and remixed its clearly autobiographical aspects, while maintaining its attention to process and inspirational roots. Paintings such as Tossing Pennies (1995), which incorporated pennies and colorful painted orbs as nodes in a connect-the-dots scheme, were determined by chance; in similarly vibrant and graphic works, she used letters and numbers as organizing systems (e.g., Louise or Jimmy, both 1996).
In the 2000s, Alvarez's work has been characterized by a decorative visuality and postmodern versatility that ranges across contemporary styles.Snodgrass, Susan, "Candida Alvarez at TBA," Art in America, May 2003, p. 154.Picard, Caroline. "Center Field, Art in the Middle/Mashed up and Shredded into Space, An Interview with Candida Alvarez," Art21, January 22, 2013. Retrieved November 14, 2022. Her TBA Exhibition Space show (2005) featured quirky, graffiti-like drawings and large fabric pieces evoking toys, keepsakes and personal history. Drawings such as Celia Mia (2000–1) juxtaposed floral and geometric patterns, text and playful characters, while the fabric works depicted such figures with bold black shapes and lines stitched in black embroidery floss on curtain-like squares of black cotton.