El Museo del Barrio presents Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop, the first large-scale museum survey of artist Candida Alvarez (b. 1955, Brooklyn, New York). This exhibition examines Alvarez’s artistic practice, bringing together rarely seen works spanning five decades of her career.
Alvarez’s engagement with painting, drawing, and collage has uniquely advanced a non hierarchical relationship between abstraction and figuration, thoughtfully interweaving formal exploration, personal narrative, and conceptual strategies. Alvarez emerged in the New York art scene of the late 1970s, focusing on figurative artworks that directly referenced her experience as a female Diasporican artist in a predominantly white male art world. By the 1990s, Alvarez starts to incorporate conceptual strategies, which embraced the use of games, language, and other representational systems while also exploring materials and forms.
The sections within the exhibition demonstrate how the artist’s core formal and conceptual tropes emerged from specific bodies of works and particular moments of her career. The exhibition’s title, which is drawn from a 1996 artwork, evokes the recurrent theme of circles in her work and the symbolic and literary interplay that shapes Alvarez’s multidisciplinary practice.
Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue, featuring newly commissioned essays by Shiben Banerji, Terry R. Myers, Susanna V. Temkin, and Adriana Zavala, that shed light on Alvarez’s artistic journey. The publication will be supplemented by archival materials, such as photographs, posters, and Alvarez’s own illustrations, providing a comprehensive view of her life and career. Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop is curated by Rodrigo Moura, chief curator, and Zuna Maza, assistant curator, with Alexia Arrizurieta, curatorial assistant.
SPONSORS
Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and Terra Foundation for American Art. Additional support is provided by Larry & Marilyn Fields, Martin Nesbitt & Anita Blanchard, Mark & Allyson Rose, and John Ellis.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Candida Alvarez (b. 1955, Brooklyn, NY) is an artist and educator whose artistic career spans five decades. Regarded as one of her generation’s most innovative and experimental painters, Alvarez’s formally rigorous abstract and figurative works weave in personal and cultural memory, art historical references, wordplay, and everyday life. Alvarez received a BFA from Fordham University, Lincoln Center (1977), and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art (1997). She has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1981), Studio Museum in Harlem (1985), Pilchuck Glass School (1998), and LUMA Foundation (2023), among others. Recent awards include the Trellis Art Fund Award (2024), the Latinx Artist Fellowship Award (2022), and American Academy of Arts and Letters Award (2022).
Selected solo shows include (Title forthcoming), Richard Gray Gallery, New York (April 2025); Candida Alvarez. Stretching, Nesting, Reaching, Feeling, Monira Foundation at Mana Contemporary, Chicago (2024); Multihyphenate, Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago (2023); Palimpsest, GAVLAK Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Palm Beach, FL; and Candida Alvarez: Here, Chicago Cultural Center (2017). She has been included in group presentations including Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s—Today, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2022-2023); no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022-2023), and ESTAMOS BIEN – La Trienal 20/21, El Museo del Barrio (2021), among others. Her work is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; El Museo del Barrio; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; and the Whitney Museum, among others.
Alvarez taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for 25 years, where she now is Professor Emerit. Currently, she is the Alex Katz Chair in Painting at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York. She lives and works between Brooklyn, Chicago, and Baroda, MI. Alvarez is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.
