“Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop” Exhibition Opening

El Museo del Barrio presents Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop, the first major museum survey of Brooklyn-born artist Candida Alvarez (b. 1955). This exhibition spans five decades of her career, showcasing rarely seen works that highlight her unique blend of abstraction and figuration.

Alvarez’s work, which includes painting, drawing, and collage, challenges traditional boundaries between abstraction and figuration, merging formal exploration with personal narrative and conceptual strategies. Emerging in the late 1970s, her early works reflected her experience as a female Diasporican artist in a predominantly white male art world. By the 1990s, she embraced conceptual approaches, incorporating games, language, and other representational systems into her art.

The exhibition explores how Alvarez’s key formal and conceptual ideas developed over time, with the title, drawn from a 1996 piece, reflecting the recurring themes of circles and the symbolic interplay that shapes her multidisciplinary practice.