Candida Alvarez facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Candida Alvarez
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| Born | 1955 |
| Education | Yale School of Art, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Fordham University |
| Known for | Painting, drawing, public art |
| Awards | US Latinx Artist Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Pollock-Krasner |
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. In her early career in New York, she worked as a curator at El Museo del Barrio 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. Her studies there set the stage for the playful form of abstraction for which she is known, and culminated in an MFA in 1997. The following year, she accepted a position at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is the F. H. Sellers Professor in Painting. 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). She has had solo exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center (2012), Chicago Cultural Center (2017), GAVLAK Gallery (Palm Beach, 2019; Los Angeles, 2021) and Monique Meloche Gallery (Chicago, 2020), among other venues.
In 2017, six existing color works by Alvarez were adapted by Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo for her "new camouflage" Comme des Garçons haute couture menswear collection.
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), Joan Mitchell Foundation (2019), International Artists' Studio Program (Stockholm, 1999), Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1994), Mid-Atlantic-NEA Regional Fellowship (1988) and New York Foundation for the Arts (1986). 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, Baltimore Museum of Art, 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, Studio Museum in Harlem, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Whitney Museum, among others. She has also received and completed three public art commissions. These include What do you See?, a set of six stained glass windows created for the P.S. 306 (public school) in the Bronx; the MTA Arts & Design project, B is for Birds in the Bronx (2006), faceted glass windscreens installed at the New York's Bronx Park East station; 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.
See also
In Spanish: Candida Alvarez para niños
