Candida Alvarez's Full Life in Living Color

New York Times

22-05-2025

'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.'
She still sees clearly the black of her patent leather tap shoes, the emerald green of her winter coat, the yellow ochre of one of her first purses.
That relationship to memory and color mark Alvarez's El Museo retrospective. The show opens with 'Soy (I Am) Boricua,' a gallery that features some of her earliest work, as she begins to find her place as a Puerto Rican artist with a vocabulary both figurative and abstract. The painting 'She Went Round and Round' (1983—84) depicts a scene in her childhood apartment. A girl spins with abandon, in the way children do to make themselves dizzy. Alvarez paints the girl's arms blurred like frames from an Eadweard Muybridge motion study. The layered but muted colors express the fog of dizziness that can transform a modest family living room into a dreamlike space.
In 'Bolero' (1984), two colorful figures embrace tenderly, cheek-to-cheek, in the traditional Latin-Caribbean slow dance against an otherwise muted room. 'Dancing felt like entering another world,' Alvarez said. 'It was a way to translate with your body, to connect to sound, to history, to something really old and passed down. You're sweating, you're twirling, you forget everything. Music is that fluid space — part memory, part reinvention.'
'Sunny' (2023), a collection of 10 framed works in paint and pencil, is, by contrast, Alvarez's contemplation of stillness. The artist says the set was inspired by Raphael's 1514 painting 'Madonna of the Chair,' an image she first saw reproduced in her mother's bible.
'I've been looking at that image since I was a little kid,' she said. 'At first, you don't really see the chair, but then you keep looking and see the Madonna, the three kids, and then slowly you see this beautiful wooden structure.' It's a kind of puzzle, and in Alvarez's versions, the colors piece together in ways that slowly unfold to the viewer.
For the 'Sunny' paintings, Alvarez also found inspiration in a series of family portraits taken over the lifetime of her nonagenarian mother. In all of them, her mother sits in a chair, which, in Alvarez's artistic imagination, conjured her mother in place of the Madonna.
'Candida is able to find the bigger ideas in things that are small and quotidian,' said Marcela Guerrero, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, who included Alvarez in the 2022 exhibition that focused on the art of the Puerto Rican diaspora after Hurricane Maria. Guerrero also added an Alvarez painting to the Whitney's collection. 'There's a liveliness and rhythm in her paintings, and they don't take themselves too seriously.'
Alvarez imbues energy in her work by going big. Her most striking works in the two shows stand over six feet tall. She was awakened to the power of size from the New York abstract painter Jack Whitten, with whom she studied as an undergraduate at Fordham University. Alvarez says Whitten — now the subject of a celebrated retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art — saw her early drawings and urged her to think bigger. 'He said, 'Candida, if you make your paintings bigger, you could win scholarships. He was right. I've been working big ever since.'
Komal Shah, a prominent collector and champion of women in abstraction, sees scale as one of Alvarez's powerful tools. 'I am always drawn to women who can conquer scale with precision,' said Shah, who added Alvarez's 2009 painting 'Black Cherry Pit' to her collection in 2024 and lent it to El Museo for the show. 'There's an amplified power in Candida's work — but there's a lot of joy in them as well.'
When intimacy is the point, she keeps the canvas small. In her series 'dinner napkin,' several pieces of which hang in the show at El Museo, Alvarez alternately embroidered images of a toy elephant, a children's rhyme in Spanish, or her son's toy boat — all fragments of her own personal history captured on soft, transportable squares.
Back in her Michigan studio, Alvarez has created a map of references: color swatches, family photos, an old projector and handwritten notes. One note reads 'sunshine and nice' in all caps. Beside it, she's taped a small image of a painting by Bob Thompson, who reimagined old master compositions through kaleidoscopic palettes and silhouetted figures. Thompson's work was an early influence on Alvarez — not just for his use of color, but for his refusal to accept the limits of tradition. 'Thompson's work is my liberation,' she said. 'Why not a pink, red or brown body frolicking under a tree?'
For their dual show at Gray, Alvarez created six paintings that echo Thompson's saturated hues and mythic scenes, but in her visual language, featuring interlocking hues, silhouettes and improvisational strokes.
Returning to the work of Thompson, Alvarez said, is a poignant point in the arc of her career. The two exhibitions add to the current constellation of shows by Black abstract and conceptual artists in Alvarez's orbit — some who have influenced her and others who have been inspired by her. 'You get older, you can kind of start to see the circles,' she says. 'Another completion, another circle. It's a gift to be able to see that and to remember it.'
Through Aug. 3, El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue, Upper Manhattan; 212-660-7102; elmuseo.org.
Real Monsters in Bold Colors: Bob Thompson and Candida Alvarez
Through July 3, Gray New York, 1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 2; 212-472 -8787; richardgraygallery.com.