Cándida Álvarez’s work (spanning a five-decade career) is presently on view at El Museo del Barrio in a survey showcasing over 100 paintings, drawings, and sculptures. “Cándida Álvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop” runs through August 3, 2025. [See our previous post on Cándida Álvarez.] Here are excerpts from a review by Elly Fishman (The New York Times), exploring “Álvarez’s full-circle journey through art, color, and culture.” Fishman writes,
After mentoring a generation of artists, the seasoned “Diasporican” painter has a career in bloom, with a solo show and a bold dialogue with Bob Thompson.
“Throughout my life, windows have given me the opportunity to reflect,” said the artist Candida Alvarez, who is featured in two big New York exhibitions that together show more than 100 of her vibrant works, many of them spirited abstractions. “Windows offer the freedom to imagine, or to just be quiet and not have to explain yourself to anybody.”
On a chilly spring afternoon, Alvarez stood looking out the picture windows that open onto three acres of Michigan woods behind her studio. The forested area was a big draw for her when, at the height of the pandemic, she moved east from Chicago and purchased the property in southwest Michigan.
Alvarez’s windows framed the first signs of the season — red-winged blackbirds flashing through the trees, fresh hoofprints from white-tailed deer. The slow transformation from muted gray to verdant green is one she anticipates each year. Soon, fast-growing vines of hops begin their dramatic climb up a neighbor’s tall trellis, visible from Alvarez’s easel. Cycles are on her mind.
At 70, Alvarez’s five-decade career is in full bloom this month. “Circle, Point, Hoop,” a sweeping museum survey at El Museo del Barrio, features 102 paintings, drawings and sculptures. “Real Monsters in Bold Colors,” a dual show at Gray New York, joins Alvarez’s work with that of the celebrated painter Bob Thompson, who died in 1966. Both shows highlight her singular ability to unspool memory, migration and material. Over her career, Alvarez has developed a richly personal language that the impressive agglomeration of her work connects and reveals.
The exhibitions also mark a cycling back to Alvarez’s hometown. Born in Brooklyn, she took a path toward an art career that was shaped in her 20s by studio instruction at El Museo, which in the late 1970s was a new and lively cultural institution for Latin American artists.
After more than two decades teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, raising her son with her former husband, the photographer Dawoud Bey, and mentoring a generation of artists, including Rashid Johnson (who debuted his own midcareer survey at the Guggenheim recently), Alvarez sees the moment as more than recognition. “It’s its own kind of loop,” she said.
Alvarez, whose parents moved to New York from Puerto Rico, identifies as “Diasporican,” a term that reflects her Puerto Rican roots and upbringing in the diaspora. She grew up in the Farragut Houses, a sprawling, but isolated public housing complex. From the windows of her family’s 14th-floor apartment, Alvarez was transfixed by the view of cars threading along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the glint of the Manhattan Bridge. The view offered an early education in light and motion. So did the stained glass in St. Ann Catholic Church, where she and her family attended mass every Sunday. “I was mesmerized by the beauty of it,” she recalled. “The detail, the gold, the garments, the light coming through those windows. That’s where my eyes would go. The rainbow colors.” [. . .]
For full article, see https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/arts/design/candida-alvarez-artist-abstract-el-museo.html
[Photo above by Sabrina Santiago for The New York Times.]
Cándida Álvarez’s work (spanning a five-decade career) is presently on view at El Museo del Barrio in a survey showcasing over 100 paintings, drawings, and sculptures. “Cándida Álvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop” runs through August 3, 2025. [See our previous post on Cándida Álvarez.] Here are excerpts from a review by Elly Fishman (The New York Times), exploring
