Candida Alvarez

Alvarez's works have included sculptures, collages, abstraction, and figuration, with materials as diverse as fabric, acrylic paint, enamel, galkyd, on various supports from canvas to cotton napkins to vellum. In Mambomountain, presented from December 2, 2012 to March 24, 2013 at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, Alvarez's brightly colored paintings offer distortions of the familiar. In Drawinggreen, presented from September 14, 2012 to October 13, 2012 at Riverside Arts Center in Chicago, Alvarez's plan with this artwork was to transform Freeark Gallery to 'directed reflection on a travel memoir'. According to the Hyde Park Art Center, in these works, "current and historic moments and identities are fused together onto the canvas, producing a hybrid state of uncharted territory." Her painting has been included at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. It was adopted by avant-garde Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo. For the past two decades, she has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Other well-known works by Alvarez include Recollections: Works on Paper by Candida Alvarez & Vincent D. Smith presented at the Brooklyn Museum in 1979.

Candida Alvarez was born in Brooklyn to parents who had arrived from Puerto Rico two years earlier, and grew up in the Farragut Houses. Alvarez earned a BFA from Fordham University in 1977 and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1981. She earned her MFA from Yale School of Art in 1997, and studied at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland from 2010-2012.

Candida Alvarez, was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1955. She is an American painter and a tenured professor of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught since 1998.