Exhibitions

Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop

24 April 2025 - 03 August 2025

El Museo del Barrio / New York City, United States

2_Candida Alvarez_ Estoy Bien_2017_ Collection of El Museo del Barrio New York_ Photograph by Martin Seck Courtesy of El Museo del Barrio, New York.

Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop, is the first large-scale museum survey of artist Candida Alvarez (b. 1955, Brooklyn, New York). This timely exhibition explores five decades of the Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican artist’s dynamic practice. Alvarez continues to innovate across diverse mediums, including painting, collage, drawing, embroidery, installation, printmaking, sculpture, and video. The show features rarely seen works, offering a comprehensive view of her influential career. The show is curated by Rodrigo Moura, Chief Curator; Zuna Maza, Assistant Curator; with Alexia Arrizurieta, Curatorial Assistant,

Alvarez’s engagement with painting, drawing, and collage as the central disciplines of her practice has uniquely advanced a non-hierarchical dialogue between abstraction and figuration. Her works interweave formal exploration, personal narrative, and conceptual strategies. Emerging in the New York art scene of the late 1970s, she initially focused on figurative works that directly reflected her experiences as a female Puerto Rican artist in a predominantly white, male-dominated art world. By the 1990s, Alvarez began incorporating conceptual approaches, drawing on games, language, and other representational systems, while simultaneously experimenting with materials and forms.

“Although Candida Alvarez’s work has been deeply influential, it has yet to receive the full visibility and recognition it deserves,” says Patrick Charpenel, Executive Director of El Museo del Barrio. “We are thrilled to spotlight her remarkable career in Circle, Point, Hoop, bringing her powerful contributions to a wider audience and honoring her place within our community and the art world at large.”

Even though Alvarez has exhibited her work across the U.S. and internationally since the 1980s, Circle, Point, Hoop marks the artist’s first museum survey, offering audiences a fuller picture of her practice in all its depth and complexity. Organized into sections, the exhibition highlights how key formal and conceptual themes have emerged from specific bodies of work and pivotal moments in her career. Within these sections, medium, form, and subject elaborate a dynamic exchange between representation and abstraction, text and image, identity and place.

“Although it follows a loosely chronological order, the show departs from a traditional retrospective format by bringing pieces from different moments in dialog to celebrate Alvarez’s artistic freedom and significant impact on the arts,” explains Rodrigo Moura.

References to family, dance, music, and the artist’s lived experiences are often fused with art historical commentary and witty formal experiments. The exhibition’s title, which is drawn from a 1996 work, evokes the recurrent theme of circles in her work and the symbolic and literary interplay that shapes Alvarez’s multidisciplinary practice.

“Alvarez has played a part in El Museo’s history—as part of the curatorial department and as an artist,” shares Zuna Maza. “It is an honor to continue our relationship and celebrate her dynamic and influential artistic practice.”

In the late 1970s, Alvarez was part of the curatorial department at El Museo, where she helped organize exhibitions like Confrontación: ambiente y espacio (Confrontation: Environment and Space, 1977), a groundbreaking collaboratively organized group show which she also participated in. Most recently, her painting Estoy Bien (I’m Fine) (2017) inspired the title of El Museo’s inaugural triennial, ESTAMOS BIEN – La Trienal 20/21.

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. Alongside these essays and a plate section, the publication will be supplemented by archival materials, such as photographs and ephemera, providing an in-depth view of her life and career. With this publication, El Museo aims to bring Alvarez’s legacy to a wider audience, offering valuable insights for art enthusiasts, artists, and researchers alike.

El Museo del Barrio is a Latinx and Latin American cultural institution. The Museum is located at 1230 Fifth Avenue at 104th Street in New York City, in the USA.

The Museum is open Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 11:00am – 5:00pm. Pay what you wish. For more information, please visit www.elmuseo.org.