Candida Alvarez Maps a Life in Color at El Museo del Barrio
Hispanic-American artist Candida Alvarez is getting some long-overdue institutional attention with a major mid-career survey at El Museo del Barrio. Titled “Circle, Point, Hoop,” the exhibition maps five decades of visual inquiry—an evolving practice that has persistently resisted the rigid borders between abstraction and figuration. Alvarez approaches painting as both a projection of the self and a mirror of the collective body, fusing the two through a web of dynamic, often contrapuntal relationships. Her work is chromatically rich and conceptually dense, braided with cultural references and meditations on embodiment, memory and the slippages of lived experience. Over time, her compositions have shifted toward abstraction, yet remain emotionally saturated and biographically grounded—unfolding as mutable mindscapes of identity, migration and place.
Alvarez emerged in the New York art scene in the late 1970s, and her early works leaned toward figuration, serving as intimate acts of self-assertion in a predominantly white, male art world. She layered visual information much as one layers memory: material fragments and residual traces coalesce into textured compositions that echo the dense overlay of personal and collective experience.
One such early work, Soy (I Am) Boricua (1980), encapsulates her enduring investigation of identity as an unresolved space of hybridity and duality. Embracing a polyphonic perspective, the painting melds emotional and physical registers of place, blurring internal and external landscapes. The bilingual title points to the multiplicity embedded in Alvarez’s experience as a first-generation Hispanic American, born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents. Yet even here, the figurative elements begin to dissolve into the current of the painting’s motion, anticipating the abstraction that would follow and signaling a worldview shaped less by fixed contours than by memory in motion and consciousness in flux.
she went round and round (1984) is another revelatory early work, one that renders the viscerality of existential sedimentation with unflinching clarity as Alvarez delves into the psychic terrain of selfhood. Through a dense layering of figuration, text and symbolic imagery, a young girl—her arms multiplied and agitated—anchors the canvas at the center of a chaotic urban field, evoking both physical motion and a fractured, proliferating identity. Ghost-like portraits, faint sketches of children and scrawled handwritten notes emerge from the painting’s tactile crust, conjuring the emotional density of contemporary life. Here, memory isn’t merely represented but also materially embedded, its unresolved shards lending the piece an intimate, almost confessional tone, haunted by a profound sense of unbelonging. As Alvarez recalls, the figure is a version of herself in a Catholic school uniform, positioned within a reconstructed memory of her family’s living room in the Farragut Projects, two decades prior; the family’s protective dog only entered their lives ten years after that remembered moment. “In this painting, I wanted to tease through my relationship to the perceptual,” she told Observer shortly after the show’s opening. “Perhaps it was through a conceptual lens that I began to notice detail.”
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Alvarez was captivated by the Impressionists’ radical approach to vision and sought to make a painting that pulsed with life, assembled from fragments that mark time and place like sediment. Her speckled, heavily worked surfaces channel the chromatic pulse of Georges Seurat’s Neo-Impressionism, but with the raw, urgent gesturalism of 1980s Neo-Expressionism. Acrylics allowed her to build dense, responsive surfaces quickly, layering emotion, memory, and formal experimentation into a single restless plane. “The disorientation from the twirling was a pivotal symbolic transition in painting. I created the space for wonder and the possibility of leaving time and place,” she said, reflecting on how this work represented a formal threshold: a decisive moment when painting ceased to be a static image and became a matrix of coexisting parts, refusing resolution between abstraction and figuration.
A resonant dialogue takes shape just a few blocks north on the Upper East Side, where GRAY has staged a compelling pairing of Alvarez’s work with that of Bob Thompson, whose mythic, chromatic figuration had a lasting influence on her practice. On view through July 3, “Real Monsters in Bold Colors: Bob Thompson and Candida Alvarez” explores how both artists marshal color and form as narrative devices, rewriting the visual language of painting from the margins. Together, they reject the rigidity of canonical styles, embracing instead a visual syntax in which images are infused with emotional charge, historical friction and the electric hum of lived experience.
In a series of works from the 1980s—some created during her time at the Yale School of Art—Candida Alvarez turned toward a more conceptual entanglement between content and form. Drawing assumed a new centrality in her practice, functioning not merely as a preparatory step, but as an active process of tracing, mapping and assembling personal constellations of meaning. Each mark became both an extension of the body and a gesture inscribed within a self-invented logic—a visual code of presence and perception. Among the pieces featured in the exhibition, 3 lbs of roofing nails, first presented in Alvarez’s MFA thesis show, stages this approach with visceral clarity. Roofing nails are embedded in a black Flashe-painted wall, forming an imperfect grid; thin chalk lines connect select points, each link suggesting an intentional study of thought, memory and sensation.
“At Yale, I was creating a cosmology of perception that was rooted in something personal and intentional. I found myself listening out for something,” Alvarez explained. “I wanted to invent a coded language, a secret language that would yield interesting formal inventions.” The physicality of her process—the hammering of nails, the scrape of charcoal, the friction of paint—became a ritual affirmation of presence. Painting directly on the wall, embedding nails and fluorescent threads into the surface, Alvarez embraced a liberatory materiality. By then, painting, writing and collage were no longer distinct categories in her practice. They had fused into a singular process of construction that was simultaneous, inseparable and alive.
“I was breaking away from the conventions I had learned earlier. When I entered my first semester at Yale, Mel Bochner opened the entrance to his exhibition at the Yale Art Gallery with the words ‘Language is not Transparent.’ It made an impact.” That phrase became a turning point, prompting Alvarez to interrogate the boundaries between image, material, and language. “He used pennies, too! My dad used to toss pennies in the air for good luck. Maybe I learned to trust my intuition from my mother, who communicated with her friends and family in mysterious ways I could never fully grasp because it was so intuitive.” For Alvarez, the act of making has always contained an element of the arcane, a silent vocabulary of codes embedded in materials—a language beyond the reach of speech.
Another piece from her MFA thesis, Wish Me Luck, extends this exploration of personal symbology through a floor-based installation that balances conceptual rigor with tactile intimacy. Alvarez arranges metal graters alongside cast glass forms and organic matter, creating a sculptural memory-object that evokes both domestic ritual and poetic relic. The work memorializes the act of preparing Puerto Rican pasteles, a cherished holiday tradition, through sensorial cues and cultural markers. Tucked between the graters are achiote seeds, used to produce the dish’s signature orange-hued oil. Resting atop them are five pennies in a direct reference to Bochner’s conceptual strategies, and a quiet, affectionate tribute to her father’s coin-tossing recontextualized as an offering or a code.
This body of work also reflects what Alvarez describes as “an internal structure of experience.” Her compositions often suggest a kind of universal, geometric order—grids, circles, repeated forms—yet they resist rigidity, remaining open to the inherent unpredictability of nature and lived perception. “I was born the second child, on the second day of the second month,” she said. “I’m a keen observer. I’m always looking for the connections in front of me. It makes life interesting.” For Alvarez, structure is personal, intuitive and sometimes numerological, a scaffolding for both meaning and improvisation.
This tension between system and spontaneity, what she calls her “game of boxes,” becomes a generative logic in her painting practice. Take the portrait Ramon (my son), which began not with an image, but with a deceptively simple calculation: counting the letters in her son’s name and mapping their positions in the alphabet. “The painting’s circular forms came last,” she said. “After I drew the shape the composition took based on all that research, I painted the forms. It’s a nod to my mother—asking for a number.” Alvarez builds outward from these small rituals, creating pieces that carry the scale and resonance of something larger—intimate yet monumental… diagrammatic yet tender.
The final galleries gather the vivid, shape-shifting abstractions for which Alvarez is best known today. Though less overtly figurative, these works still teem with movement. Look closely and you’ll find twisting limbs and ghostly silhouettes woven through the layers. Their interlocking, flatly painted forms in saturated and muted hues cohere into what she has called “kaleidoscopic collages,” where fragments of bodies, landscapes and patterns converge in rhythmic collision. The compositions feel like puzzles that never resolve, instead insisting on the vitality of multiplicity.
According to Alvarez, her art began with looking at other art—particularly the black-and-white collages of Romare Bearden, which she first encountered in a 1970s catalog from El Museo del Barrio. “They left me with a determination to deconstruct pictures in a way I never thought possible,” she said. But instead of cutting and pasting like Bearden, she drew—lifting forms, isolating shapes, distilling the image to what she needed. “Slowly, those parts turned into an armature for colors to grasp.” What emerges is a vocabulary in which abstraction and representation are never binary opposites but always in dialogue, interdependent and relational. “They were the inner core, the composition of a picture. I like to say that abstraction and representation do not exist alone but always in relationship to each other.”
Among the most recent works in the exhibition, Estoy Bien [I’m Fine] (2017) stands as a poignant demonstration of Candida Alvarez’s capacity to embed personal and collective histories in the very materials of her practice. This seemingly abstract composition—rendered in ink, acrylic and enamel on latex—takes full advantage of its PVC support’s double-sided surface, encouraging viewers to engage with it from shifting vantage points. Created in the aftermath of several life-altering events—her father’s death, the devastation of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and her mother’s subsequent relocation to the U.S.—the piece takes its title from a phrase repeated by many Puerto Ricans in the hurricane’s wake: “Estoy bien,” or “I’m fine.” What might sound like reassurance becomes a protective veil, and in Alvarez’s hands, the phrase becomes an emotional architecture, a layered and ambivalent refrain that carries both grief and resilience. The result is a work that materializes trauma and healing in equal measure and is charged with the psychic residue of survival.
Across her five-decade career, Alvarez has not only cultivated a singular artistic voice but has also shaped a legacy as an educator and researcher, roles that mirror her unceasing curiosity and experimental rigor. For her, art is not a product but rather a process, a lifelong practice of inquiry and revelation. Two decades at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago immersed her in a richly interdisciplinary environment, reinforcing her belief that creativity need not follow a single path. “Material is a love affair,” she mused. “Once you have the skills, the question remains… What do you do with them? I used it to figure out what I needed to do to live a life that mattered.” The interplay between technical fluency and existential searching is at the core of Alvarez’s work, where every material decision becomes a means of reckoning with memory, identity and presence.
Now retired from teaching, Alvarez is fully devoted to her studio practice. “I risked everything to do what I do. It takes courage, passion and conviction,” she said. “My work has given me the courage to speak up and share something magical in a dimension that resists labels. It’s the only life I know where I can be completely myself, all the time.”
“Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop” is on view at El Museo del Barrio through August 3, 2025.