Candida Alvarez

Chicago, Illinois

Artworks shown are selected from works submitted by the artist in their grant or residency application. All works are copyright of the artist or artist’s estate.

About Candida Alvarez

Candida Alvarez is a Puerto Rican artist and educator from Brooklyn, NY. She has been working as a visual artist for the last 40 years. Based in Chicago, she holds the distinguished F.H. Sellers Chair in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has taught for the last 20 years. Alvarez received a BA from Fordham University in 1977 and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1997. Alvarez is represented by Gavlak LA/Palm Beach and Monique Meloche, Chicago. Her works are in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, among others. She collaborated with the fashion label Comme des Garçons in 2017, and reviews of her work have appeared in Art in America, ARTnews, and The New York Times. In Fall 2019, Candida Alvarez: Here. A Visual Reader, will be published by Green Lantern Press.

Program Participation

Painters & Sculptors Grant, 2019

Website / Social Links

My work stumbles through what I think of as chatty abstractions that shape-shift and dream-catch both light and space. These investigations allow my paintings and drawings to build abstract structures that mix and remix themselves, interweaving the narrative with the pictorial.”