Candida Alvarez (b. 1955) “cbob 1,” 2024. Acrylic on linen, 60 × 80 inches, 152.4 × 203.2 cm. Courtesy the artist and GRAY Chicago/New York, and Monique Meloche Gallery. Photo: Evan Jenkins
On a cold, overcast day in late February of this year, in the studio out back of her home in Baroda, Michigan, the artist Candida Alvarez is finishing a series of paintings for an upcoming exhibition at Gray gallery in New York City.
“Real Monsters in Bold Colors,” on view through July 3, puts ten new works by Alvarez in dialogue with seven works by Bob Thompson, the celebrated painter whose artistic career was cut short when he died in 1966, less than a month shy of his twenty-ninth birthday.
The idea to pair the artists was sparked by a moment of serendipity during a gallery tour of Alvarez’s studio. Spotting an image of a Thompson work she had taped to the wall, Gray staff saw a connection between the two artists, from their distinctive and powerful use of color to the way they engage, explicitly or obliquely, with art history and figurative and abstract modes of artmaking, to depict the events of everyday life, personal and historical.
Alvarez, who first learned about Thompson in the mid-1990s while studying for her MFA at Yale University, says she always liked his paintings but didn’t immediately see the link. Still, his work triggered intriguing ideas about context and composition. Over the long stretch of months she spent preparing for the show, which includes acrylic paintings and watercolor pencil drawings, she found a sense of liberation in her dialogue with Thompson’s paintings, an open association she likens to “walking with him.”
Candida Alvarez, courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery/Photo: Chester Alamo Costello
Alvarez is acclaimed in part for the expressive energy of her work, the way her compositions emerge through brilliant, bold hues and dynamic, pulsating shapes, which at times seem to form figures and at other times remain opaquely abstract, almost camouflage-like. “For me painting is about getting to color,” she says. “The mystery of color, the alchemy of it. That to me is why I paint.”
Being in dialogue with Thompson ended up shifting her color palette. Noting that she “doesn’t usually use such declarative color,” in studying his paintings, including “Triptych,” a small and enigmatic work featuring a pair of entwined, dark gray figures across three landscapes, she too went darker. “This is really kind of a weird painting,” she says of his piece. “You don’t know what’s happening there. So I got really tense when I saw this.”
Exploring that tension and the challenge it presented involved shifting her perspective back onto her own body of work. “I decided [to] go back to this earlier painting I did, which I love, it’s like the Renaissance tile, the black and white,” she says. “So Candida’s coming full circle around again. I’m kind of pushing Bob a little bit further away. That’s what happens. You borrow things, you come back and then you’re like, okay, see you later.”
Installation view of “Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop” at El Museo del Barrio, New York, 2025/Photo: Matthew Sherman/ Courtesy of El Museo del Barrio, New York
For Alvarez herself, this moment offers a coming full circle on many levels. “Real Monsters in Bold Colors,” her first show with Gray, opened on the last day of April. A handful of days earlier, “Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop,” her first solo show in New York since 1993, opened at El Museo del Barrio. The first-ever museum survey of her work, happening at the same place where in 1977 she exhibited for the first time, as part of a group show, makes it all the more special. El Museo is one of her cultural homes, an institution where she’s forged a longstanding and productive relationship.
Alongside these shows, Alvarez has made other strides. She had her first solo booth at Frieze Los Angeles with Chicago’s Monique Meloche gallery, which has represented Alvarez since 2019 and presented two of her solo exhibitions, most recently “Multihyphenate” in 2023. Later this year, a public art piece Alvarez made for the newly redeveloped Terminal 6 at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens will be unveiled.
Alvarez, on the cusp of it all, is in the thick of work, pushing herself to finish everything in time. Still, she takes a moment to reflect on where she’s arrived. “To be showing again in New York, to have two shows back to back, you know, it doesn’t just happen like that,” she muses, adding, “I just feel it’s a good time.”
Candida Alvarez, 2025 studio portrait. Courtesy Gray Chicago New York and Monique Meloche Gallery/Photo: Bob. (Robert Chase Heishman + Robert Salazar)
At Alvarez’s Michigan studio, once a simple pole barn, all that activity and acclaim seemed very far away. The bright interior, painted white with polished concrete floors, has a homey feel. Seven long shelves loaded with hundreds of art books run along one wall. A cluster of large, happy-looking plants sit near a set of sliding glass doors that open onto a stretch of lawn and a small, quiet forest. Near the center of the space, a comfy wicker chair lined with mismatched cushions sits in front of a round footrest. All of it feels of a piece with Alvarez, who, with her curly salt-and-pepper hair, easygoing smile and sparkling eyes, emanates a warmth of spirit and vitality.
Alvarez moved to Michigan during the pandemic, at first temporarily and then, realizing it could be a permanent base, found this home. The studio has a garage door so that during the winter months, especially after working until the wee hours, she can drive her car the short distance from her house right into the studio and back, avoiding the treacherous ice and snow in the dark as well as the many deer passing through the property. “They scare me,” she says, adding with a laugh, “The Brooklyn girl comes out, you know?”
Seeking to escape the restrictions and anxiety of the lockdown, she found a refuge for artistic contemplation. The imposed isolation, coming on the heels of another busy period in her career, offered her a chance to take stock and regroup.
“I’m grateful that I have learned to respect my silences, because painting is a series of silences,” she says. “It is unpredictable sometimes, but you have to get into that mindset, to be… Ready is not really the right word. It holds you and you hold it and you just know when it’s time.”
Candida Alvarez (b. 1955) “cbob 3,” 2025. Acrylic on linen, 22 ¼ × 22 ? inches , 56.5 x 56.2 cm. Courtesy the artist and GRAY Chicago/New York, and Monique Meloche Gallery. Photo: Evan Jenkins
Tapping into that feeling of aliveness, of normal day-to-day life, is central to Alvarez’s practice, which manages to be both experimental and ever-evolving while staying rooted in the formative experiences that have shaped her, from her early childhood to the present moment. It is also fundamental to who she is as a person, how she sees the world.
A lively and playful interlocutor, Alvarez’s mind moves quickly and in unexpected directions. Discussing collage, which is so central to her art, she begins by saying she doesn’t really like the term, because it makes too formal what she believes is an almost innate mode of organizing the world, one we become familiar with as children, playing with different shapes to create images and stories. Then she speculates that a chicken, with its bounty of variegated feathers, might be the ultimate collage, especially when it is cut up in parts to be fried and eaten. This leads to the tragic story of her two pets, Honey the chicken and Gigi the dog, the best of friends until Gigi played a bit too rough and accidentally ended Honey’s short life. Somehow this mix of aesthetic observations and family history flows together seamlessly.
Alvarez was born in Brooklyn and grew up in a tight-knit family, as one of three children, two girls and a boy, very close in age. Her father moved to New York from Puerto Rico after serving in the Korean War. Through a family connection, he essentially chaperoned his soon-to-be-wife, Alvarez’s mother, to the city—young women weren’t supposed to travel on their own. During the long plane ride, Alvarez says they fell in love and in quick order, moved in with his family, married and had children.
Candida Alvarez, “John Street Series #12” from the “John Street Series,” 1988. Charcoal on paper, 38 x 50 in. Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York. Museum purchase via the Ford Foundation, 1991/Photo: Matthew Sherman/Courtesy of El Museo del Barrio, New York
At first the family lived in a public-housing project, on the top floor of the brand-new high-rise Farragut Houses near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The view, which offered Alvarez an ever-changing landscape that allowed her to see things on multiple planes, up close and far away, in detail and more abstract, thrilled her. “There was something about [it] where the imagination could just be right, and there was nothing to answer to. It was intoxicating.”
Other aspects of their life were less happy. Alvarez says she and her siblings were bullied by schoolmates. “We were too nice. We were bred too Catholic.” She can still recall the smell of urine in the elevators and the horrific scene of a schoolmate’s death, who was pushed off the roof of one of the Farragut buildings. They changed schools and her parents saved enough to buy a house in Vinegar Hill, another Brooklyn neighborhood. Trips sponsored by the Fresh Air Fund, which provides kids with free summer camping trips in upstate New York, introduced her to other perspectives and, formatively, her first embroidery lessons and paint-by-number kit.
In her conversations and in her work, Alvarez often recalls these experiences, which serve as touchstones for her creative process, ones she circles back to again and again in her work, reworking and relaying them in different forms. Even now they retain an air of mystery, of unknowability, one she doesn’t necessarily want to unravel.
Of her time in the Catholic Church she recalls being dazzled by the stained-glass windows but not by the rituals and prayers. “I never paid attention, I just watched the light coming through,” she recalls. “I loved the vestments, I loved the gold. I loved watching all the color that was flowing. Why did I pay attention to those things? I don’t know.”
Candida Alvarez, 2025 studio portrait. Courtesy Gray Chicago New York and Monique Meloche Gallery/Photo: Bob. (Robert Chase Heishman + Robert Salazar)
It wasn’t until Alvarez got to Fordham University in the 1970s that she began to figure out that there was such a thing as an artist. A friend was taking an art class which caught Alvarez’s attention. “People were carrying these black portfolios, and I went and got one. I was like, oh, these are kind of cool!” Once she enrolled in some art classes, she began a pattern that has extended across her life: coming into contact with people who were or would go on to become some of the most acclaimed American artists of the twenty-first century.
At Fordham that included Susan Crile, a New York artist now in her eighties who is still painting; Curt Barnes, who was also the director of studio art; and especially Jack Whitten, a visiting artist who became an influential mentor, and, in another bit of serendipity, is currently the subject of a retrospective, in New York. Alvarez recalls that Whitten encouraged her to rework the small ballpoint pen drawings she’d been making, saying if she produced larger versions, she would very likely win a scholarship to an art school like Cooper Union, where he was teaching, and become a painter.
Alvarez wasn’t ready. She hadn’t quite figured out what it meant to be an artist. Instead she went to El Museo del Barrio, which was founded in 1969 by a group of Puerto Rican activists, educators and artists committed to elevating the work of Latino artists whose work was neglected by the mainstream art world. She took classes, including in printmaking, taught and helped curate an exhibition. She found her community.
Candida Alvarez, “She Wore Red to the Senior Prom,” 1983-1984. Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 36 in. Courtesy the artist. Photograph by Tom Van Eynde
Eventually she was introduced to the CETA Arts Project, a federally funded, New York City-run job training program which employed artists—dancers, painters, filmmakers, actors—to teach and work on arts projects with community organizations and city planners. In our current moment, when federal and private funding for artists is both contested and in significant decline across the board, it sounds like a dream. But similar political and economic dynamics led to the program’s demise after only two years.
CETA not only provided her with $10,000 a year to live on and another circle of artist friends, it led her to the photographer Dawoud Bey, who would become her husband. Grouped with the program’s writers, who formed a mobile troupe called “Words to Go,” and included the renowned Puerto Rican poet and playwright Pedro Pietri, she felt affirmed by this “amazing group of souls” who were a lively bunch, always on. Says Alvarez, “I was really shy, so I learned, oh, okay, you can be performative. You can imagine yourself as this other being. It was just fun and interesting.”
Other formative spaces include the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture summer program for artists in Maine, where Alvarez was in residence in 1981. Inspired by her proximity to its rural environs, she produced a now-iconic series of paintings of cows, two of which, “Weeping Cows” and “Ancient Cow,” both from 1981, are part of the survey at El Museo. In the mid-nineties, along with their young son Ramon, she accompanied Bey to Yale University and after he completed his degree, she embarked on her own MFA, graduating in 1997.
This two-decade-long chapter of continuous education, exploration and expansion of her aesthetic in and around New York came to a close in 1998, when Alvarez accepted a full-time teaching job at the School of the Art Institute and moved to Chicago along with Bey, who embarked on his own long teaching career, in photography, at Columbia College Chicago.
Candida Alvarez, “Circle, Point, Hoop,” 1996. String, nails, and gouache on wood, Diameter: 24 in. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Bob. (Robert Chase Heishman + Robert Salazar) / Courtesy of El Museo del Barrio, New York
If New York has been the bedrock of Alvarez’s personal life and artistic practice, Chicago provided a scaffolding allowing her to ascend. Nestled in a series of studios in the Fine Arts Building on South Michigan Avenue, Alvarez found another room with a mesmerizing view, looking over the city and toward Lake Michigan. In addition to teaching and making her own art, there she created Subcity, an on-and-off exhibition space which offered a perch for other artists, including iconic figures such as Joyce Pensato and Barbara Kasten as well as some of her students.
Her marriage ended in 2006 and her son grew up and moved to Los Angeles to work as a music producer. But Alvarez forged other deep art-world relationships, with Kasten—both had studios at Mana Contemporary for a stretch—and her gallerist Monique Meloche, who says she was the first person to do a studio visit with Alvarez after she moved to Chicago, before starting to represent her in 2019.
One of the highlights of Alvarez’s Chicago sojourn is the 2017 survey of her work, guest-curated by her longtime colleague and friend Terry R. Myers and presented at the Chicago Cultural Center. Titled simply “Candida Alvarez: Here,” the show presented her paintings spanning forty years, from the mid-seventies to the present.
Candida Alvarez, “Soy (I Am) Boricua,” 1989. Acrylic and oil on 2 wood panels, 68 x 46 in. Courtesy the artist/Photo: Tom Van Eynde
There are many echoes of “Here” in “Circle, Point, Hoop” at El Museo del Barrio, which also includes some of her best-known paintings, like early diptychs “Dame un Numero” (1985) and “Soy (I Am) Boricua” (1989); the works she made in the nineties while at Yale, where her fascination with circles, numbers and puzzles becomes even more explicit, including the 1996 circular, nail-studded sculptural piece from which the exhibition’s title is derived; as well as more recent works, such as “Estoy Bien,” from her 2017-2019 series of Air Paintings and the installation “Sunny,” from her 2023 solo show “Multihyphenate.”
In the spacious galleries, some walls covered in a warm peach hue, there is room to look closely at Alvarez’s work and much to discover. How the thick speckled ropes of paint stretching across her 1984 painting “She Went Round and Round” seem to be flying onto the canvas from the spinning, outstretched arms of the work’s central figure, creating a literal action painting. The way her brilliant colors seem to float up against one another, bounce softly away or run aground in a slash of sparkle.
Alvarez says, “I just want the paintings to live on their own terms. And I want you, as the viewer to… Hopefully, they can seduce you in some way.”
Installation view of “Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop” at El Museo del Barrio, New York, 2025/Photo: Matthew Sherman/ Courtesy of El Museo del Barrio, New York
Alvarez now has five decades of artistic output and Maza, who put the show together with El Museo’s former chief curator Rodrigo Moura and curatorial assistant Alexia Arrizurieta, says the exhibition moves beyond painting to include a wide range of Alvarez’s artmaking, especially her prints and drawings. One of the earliest works is a 1975 drawing she made while at Fordham, for a class taught by Jack Whitten.
Toward the end of the show, in a section of ephemera documenting some of her projects, there is a series of small ballpoint illustrations she made for a proposed children’s book about Pura Belpré, the first Puerto Rican librarian in the New York Public Library system, which was never realized. Tucked away in another corner is a beautiful photo of Alvarez from the late 1970s, admiring the mural she made for the original and now-demolished Langston Hughes Community Library and Cultural Center in Queens.
Having achieved emeritus status and mostly retired from teaching, Alvarez is free to focus on her artistic practice without limits. During the pandemic, while listening to what her paintings had to say, she was also telling them what she needed. Alvarez recalls, with a laugh, “I was like, okay, I love you, but you gotta go. And slowly but surely they started to sell.” Meloche says a significant number of museums acquired Alvarez works during this period, including the Denver Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Along with more artistic and financial freedom has come a sense of liberation from the endless efforts to categorize her art in a particular way. “I don’t care what they call it or name it, because in my mind it’s always different,” says Alvarez. “It comes from a deeper place, a growing place,” she says. “It’s a beautiful thing to have a language that is totally yours.”
At her opening at Gray, all the circles and years of Alvarez’s life came together and overlapped, forming a Venn diagram that she centered. Her former husband Dawoud Bey and son Ramon were there. One of her students from Cooper Union showed up with his mother, both artists. Lots of Chicago transplants—including Rashid Johnson and Sheree Hovsepian—dropped in as well as many friends and artists she’s known for decades.
In Baroda, Alvarez told me she’s learned what matters most to her is to be really in it, to cherish the action of work and life. In the thick of the crowded gallery, dressed like a queen in a sparkly black and silver bell-shaped dress, Alvarez looked elegant and fully present, cherishing and cherished.