Mestre Didi: Spiritual Form
Organized by El Museo del Barrio, Mestre Didi: Spiritual Form is a landmark monographic exhibition exploring the work of the late Afro-Brazilian sculptor, writer, cultural advocate and spiritual leader Mestre Didi (Salvador, 1917-2013). As the first major U.S. museum exhibition of Didi’s work in 25 years, the survey unites over 30 of his sculptures and offers a rare view of his far-reaching spiritual and artistic legacy.
Over the course of his career, from the 1960s until the 2010s, Mestre Didi was a visionary emissary for Candomblé. He was perhaps the first artist to reimagine Candomblé ritual objects as artworks in their own right.
El Museo’s exhibition will foreground Mestre Didi’s spiritually evocative and formally imaginative sculptures and present new interpretations of his symbolic repertoire. His distinctive artworks combine the traditional materials, shapes, and symbols of the orishas, the Candomblé deities, to create a modern sculptural language.
Mestre Didi: Spiritual Form also contextualizes Didi’s practice by including key works by his artistic peers and by contemporary practitioners. In addition to Mestre Didi, the exhibition includes works by Emanoel Araújo, Jorge dos Anjos, Agnaldo Manoel dos Santos, Aurelino dos Santos, Ayrson Heráclito, Goya Lopes, Antonio Oloxedê, Abdias Nascimento, Arlete Soares, Nádia Taquary, and Rubem Valentim. The influence of these artists’ shared interest in African visual languages ranges from 20th century modernisms to the continued innovation of Black diasporic aesthetics today.
The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue featuring contributions from the curators and newly commissioned scholarly essays by art historians Roberto Conduru and Abigail Lapin Dardashti and biographer Joselia Aguiar. It will also include selected reprints of the artist’s own writings, made available in English for the first time. Mestre Didi: Spiritual Form is curated by Rodrigo Moura, chief curator and guest curator Ayrson Heráclito with Chloë Courtney, curatorial fellow.
SPONSORS
Mestre Didi: Spiritual Form is presented by the Ministério da Cultura of Brazil, Itaú, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support is provided by the Diane & Bruce Halle Foundation and The Edward W. Rose III Family Fund at The Dallas Foundation, and by Guilherme Simões de Assis, Almeida & Dale Galeria da Arte, São Paulo, James Cohan Gallery, Flavia & Guilherme Teixeira, Fernanda Feitosa & Heitor Martins, Allan Schwartzman, and Graham Steele.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Mestre Didi, born as Deoscóredes Maximiliano dos Santos, was closely involved in the Candomblé religious society Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá from a young age, where he spent decades making traditional ritual objects. Around 1962, he began to create sculptures and pursue exhibition opportunities, with early shows at Galeria Ralf (Salvador), Galeria Bonino (Rio de Janeiro), and the Museu de Arte Moderna, Salvador. After receiving a fellowship from UNESCO to conduct fieldwork in West Africa in 1967, Didi and the anthropologist Juana Elbein dos Santos, his wife, organized the exhibition Afro-Brazilian Art, which was presented in Lagos, Accra, Dakar, Paris, London, and Buenos Aires between 1968 and 1974 and included Didi’s work. Since the 1980s Didi has been included in landmark exhibitions such as A Mão Afro-Brasileira [The Afro-Brazilian Hand] at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) in 1988; Art in Latin America at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1989; Magiciens de la Terre [Magicians of the Earth], Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 1989; the 23rd International Biennial of São Paulo, in 1996, with a solo presentation; and Afro-Atlantic Histories, MASP, in 2018. His works are included in public and private collections internationally, including at El Museo del Barrio, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Dallas Museum of Art, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Museu Afro Brasil, and Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro.
Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop
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, former 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, Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additional support is provided by Larry & Marilyn Fields, Martin Nesbitt & Anita Blanchard, Mark & Allyson Rose, John Ellis, Elizabeth Pepperman, and Richard Gray Gallery.
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.