Candida Alvarez

Candida Alvarez, Are you listening to this?, acrylic on linen, metallic marker, liquid glitter, 84" x 72", 2022.

Candida Alvarez (born 1955) is an American artist and professor, known for her paintings and drawings.

Alvarez has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Whitney, Art Institute of Chicago, San Jose Museum of Art, and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, among others. She was named a 2022 US Latinx Artist Fellow and has been recognized by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation and Pollock-Krasner Foundation. She lives and works in Chicago and Baroda, Michigan and is a professor of painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Education and career Alvarez was born in 1955 in Brooklyn to parents who had arrived from Puerto Rico two years earlier. She grew up in a high-rise building in the Farragut Houses public housing project. Alvarez attended Fordham University at Lincoln Center in New York and received a BA in studio art/liberal arts in 1977; she studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1981. and exhibited in group shows at institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, Studio Museum in Harlem (artist residency) and Jamaica Arts Center. During that time, she had solo shows at Exit Art (1985), Queens Museum (1991), and Bronx Museum of the Arts (1992), among others.

In 1995, she enrolled at the Yale School of Art, studying with Mel Bochner, Rochelle Feinstein and Howardena Pindell. In her later career, Alvarez has been included in major surveys of abstraction ("Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today," Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 2017) and Latinx art ("Estamos Bien – La Trienal 20/21," El Museo del Barrio, 2021; "Latinx Abstract," BRIC, 2021; "no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria," Whitney Museum, 2022). GAVLAK Gallery (Palm Beach, 2019; Los Angeles, 2021) New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote that the " lyrical, painterly work" charted progress "from darkness to light and from fragmentation to wholeness," drawing strength from its ambiguity regarding the relationships between human figures and natural forces. In monumental works such as mary in the sky with diamonds (2005), arroz amargo (2010) and hi ho silver (2008), she created shifting, layered surfaces packed with textures, ideas and scraps of pop culture. New City compared the billowing shapes, sinuous lines and snippets of text of the latter painting to "a cartoon that’s been chopped up in a blender." New York Times critic Holland Cotter described Alvarez's title as complex and "tinged with irony, the words suggest[ing] both resilience and bitterness"; the museum called it "a declaration of defiant resilience and a provocation, conflating a sarcastic and a positive tone." The exhibition (which included Alvarez) confronted systems of power and examined identity, structural racism, migration, displacement, climate and ecological justice through the work of 42 artists and collectives. from April 24, 2025 to August 3, 2025. The exhibit displayed works from her 5 decade career including paintings and sculptures.

Awards and recognition In 2022, Alvarez was named a US Latinx Artist Fellow (Ford Foundation and Mellon Foundation) and received an Arts and Letters award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has also been recognized by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation (2021), She has been awarded artist residencies by the LUMA Foundation (Arles), MacDowell Colony, MoMA PS1, Pilchuck Glass School and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Alvarez's work belongs to public art collections including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Blanton Museum of Art, Brandywine Workshop and Archives, DePaul Art Museum, El Museo Del Barrio, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Pérez Art Museum Miami, San Jose Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Howlings—Soft Paintings (2017), a latex-on-PVC mural installed on the banks of the Chicago River as a part of Chicago's Year of Public Art.