Candida Alvarez survey at El Museo del Barrio
El Museo del Barrio in New York presents ‘Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop,” the first large-scale museum survey of the renowned artist Candida Alvarez (b. 1955, Brooklyn, New York). Curated by Rodrigo Moura, former Chief Curator; Zuna Maza, Assistant Curator; with Alexia Arrizurieta, Curatorial Assistant, this timely exhibition explores five decades of the Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican artist’s dynamic practice. Alvarez continues to innovate across diverse mediums, including painting, collage, drawing, embroidery, installation, printmaking, sculpture, and video. The show features rarely seen works, offering a comprehensive view of her influential career.
Alvarez’s engagement with painting, drawing, and collage as the central disciplines of her practice has uniquely advanced a non-hierarchical dialogue between abstraction and figuration. Her works thoughtfully interweave formal exploration, personal narrative, and conceptual strategies. Emerging in the New York art scene of the late 1970s, she initially focused on figurative works that directly reflected her experiences as a female Puerto Rican artist in a predominantly white, male-dominated art world. By the 1990s, Alvarez began incorporating conceptual approaches, drawing on games, language, and other representational systems, while simultaneously experimenting with materials and forms.
“Although Candida Alvarez’s work has been deeply influential, it has yet to receive the full visibility and recognition it deserves,” Patrick Charpenel, Executive Director of El Museo del Barrio, said. “We are thrilled to spotlight her remarkable career in ‘Circle, Point, Hoop,’ bringing her powerful contributions to a wider audience and honoring her place within our community and the art world at large.”
Even though Alvarez has exhibited her work across the U.S. and internationally since the 1980s, ‘Circle, Point, Hoop’ marks the artist’s first museum survey, offering audiences a fuller picture of her practice in all its depth and complexity. Organized into sections, the exhibition highlights how key formal and conceptual themes have emerged from specific bodies of work and pivotal moments in her career. Within these sections, medium, form, and subject elaborate a dynamic exchange between representation and abstraction, text and image, identity and place.
“Although it follows a loosely chronological order, the show departs from a traditional retrospective format by bringing pieces from different moments in dialog to celebrate Alvarez’s artistic freedom and significant impact on the arts,” Rodrigo Moura said.
References to family, dance, music, and the artist’s lived experiences are often fused with art historical commentary and witty formal experiments. The exhibition’s title, which is drawn from a 1996 work, evokes the recurrent theme of circles in her work and the symbolic and literary interplay that shapes Alvarez’s multidisciplinary practice. “Alvarez has played a part in El Museo’s history—as part of the curatorial department and as an artist,” Zuna Maza said.
In the late 1970s, Alvarez was part of the curatorial department at El Museo, where she helped organize exhibitions like “Confrontación: ambiente y espacio (Confrontation: Environment and Space, 1977),” a groundbreaking collaboratively organized group show which she also participated in. Most recently, her painting Estoy Bien (I’m Fine) (2017) inspired the title of El Museo’s inaugural triennial, “ESTAMOS BIEN – La Trienal 20/21.”
