El Museo del Barrio

El Museo del Barrio presents Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop, the first large-scale museum survey of artist Candida Alvarez (b. 1955, Brooklyn, New York). This exhibition examines Alvarez’s artistic practice, bringing together rarely seen works spanning five decades of her career.

Alvarez’s engagement with painting, drawing, and collage has uniquely advanced a non hierarchical relationship between abstraction and figuration, thoughtfully interweaving formal exploration, personal narrative, and conceptual strategies. Alvarez emerged in the New York art scene of the late 1970s, focusing on figurative artworks that directly referenced her experience as a female Diasporican artist in a predominantly white male art world. By the 1990s, Alvarez starts to incorporate conceptual strategies, which embraced the use of games, language, and other representational systems while also exploring materials and forms.

The sections within the exhibition demonstrate how the artist’s core formal and conceptual tropes emerged from specific bodies of works and particular moments of her career. The exhibition’s title, which is drawn from a 1996 artwork, evokes the recurrent theme of circles in her work and the symbolic and literary interplay that shapes Alvarez’s multidisciplinary practice. 

Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue, featuring newly commissioned essays by Shiben Banerji, Terry R. Myers, Susanna V. Temkin, and Adriana Zavala, that shed light on Alvarez’s artistic journey. The publication will be supplemented by archival materials, such as photographs, posters, and Alvarez’s own illustrations, providing a comprehensive view of her life and career. Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop is curated by Rodrigo Moura, former chief curator, and Zuna Maza, assistant curator, with Alexia Arrizurieta, curatorial assistant.