Continuing at El Museo: Candida Alvarez | Circle, Point, Hoop

This exhibition, spanning 48 years of Candida Alvarez’s bold, vibrant practice, is a celebration of color, culture, and artistic vision that highlights her evolution through painting, drawing, and collage. Exploring the interaction between abstraction and figuration, with a focus on her experience as a female artist in a predominantly male environment, it begins with figurative works that reflected her identity as a diasporic artist. In the 1990s. Alvarez emerged in the New York art scene  beginning in the late 1970s. She began collaging conceptual strategies into her figural works, experimenting with materials and representational systems.

A native New Yorker who grew up in Brooklyn’s high-rise Farragut Houses, she says,  “When you look out that window, it’s not just one thing—it’s a space between, where both figuration and abstraction exist.” Over her long career, the artist has translated her sharp attunement to color, texture, and shape into a relentlessly experimental body of work that spans painting, collage, embroidery, installation, sculpture, and video. 

In addition to earlier experiments with paint, embroidery, and assemblage, the El Museo exhibition also spotlights later work, like Alvarez’s “Air Paintings” [above] The suite of latex ink and enamel compositions on PVC mesh hang from aluminum armatures and can be viewed from the back and front. The series, which made a stir when it debuted at Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago in 2020, came out of Alvarez’s anxiety following Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. (Her parents are from the island and have a family home in Ponce.)

Alongside the El Museo survey, Alvarez is also showing new work at Gray Gallery New York as part of a two-person show that puts her paintings in dialogue with the late Bob Thompson, another maverick artist with a cult following.

Candida Alvarez, Circle, Point, Hoop continues through August 2 at El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue, at 104^th Street New York, NY Info

Real Monsters in Bold Colors: Bob Thompson and Candida Alvarez at Gray Gallery

This exhibition highlights the two artists’ use of color and form as vehicles for storytelling, while underscoring their distinct approaches to rebuffing and reimagining the painting traditions that preceded them. Real Monsters in Bold Colors offers a view into the working practice of contemporary artist, Candida Alvarez [above], by way of the work of Bob Thompson [below]. The exhibition reveals how artists find inspiration in their surroundings, often borrowing, expanding, and riffing off of historical sources as well as other artists, poets, and musicians to make their work.

The exhibition title is derived from an essay on Bob Thompson written by the late poet Hettie Jones (1934-2024) whose close ties with the artist reflects a deep understanding of his vision and conveys the multifarious energy of the creative landscape in 1960s New York. Jones’s language conveys the anxiety of representing humanity and rehashing images and allegories of the past at a time when abstraction was on the rise, but also notes that as a young poet seeing the work,“we also saw the future in these multicolored worlds.”  

Continuing through July 3 at Gray New York, 1018 Madison Avenue, New York, NY Info

Save the date: June 28, 5-8pm: Women in Abstraction at Americas Society

Art at Americas Society, in partnership with the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, is pleased to present Women and Abstractions in Postwar Americas, a two-day symposium examining the contributions of women artists to postwar art across the Americas. Join in-person or online for afternoon and evening sessions hosted at both Americas Society and the Institute of Fine Arts. The program will feature twelve speakers presenting a range of perspectives including a keynote presentation by Mónica Amor. The speakers will include Susan Aberth, Laura Anderson Barbata, Francesca Ferrari, Elizabeth Ferrer, Ana M. Franco, Vivian Li, Zuna Maza, Mary-Kate O’Hare, Delia Solomons, Rachel Vorsanger, Manuela Well-Off-Man, with remarks by Aimé Iglesias Lukin and Edward J. Sullivan. All sessions will be live streamed. Info

May 30: Arresting Beauty | Julia Margaret Cameron at The Morgan

Arresting Beauty explores the path-breaking career of photography’s first widely recognized artist. Cameron (1815–1879) was born in Calcutta modern day Kolkata) to a French mother and an English father. In 1848, with her husband and children, she moved to England, residing on the Isle of Wight, where she was close neighbors with the poet Alfred Tennyson. Here, Cameron acquired her first camera at age 48; within eleven years she would create thousands of exposures and leave an enduring image of the Victorian era as an age of intellectual and spiritual ambition.

Cameron’s prodigious drive helped her become a probing portraitist of leading writers, artists, and scientists, such as Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, G.F. Watts, and Charles Darwin, while her absorption with fine art, notably Renaissance painting, led her to create staged tableaux in a mode that has been perpetually rediscovered by photographers down to the present. Left, Pomona [1872}, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection

Most distinct of all was Cameron’s wholly personal handling of her medium. Heedless of  contemporary conventions of technique, alert to the happy effects of accident, and indifferent to critical scorn, she embraced a style of spontaneous intimacy that distanced her from the photographic establishment of her time and class. Motion blur, highly selective focus, and even fingerprints on the glass negatives (which required developing before their emulsions dried) are among the idiosyncrasies of her singular oeuvre.

Cameron was quick to exploit publishing and promotional opportunities: at London’s South Kensington Museum (today the Victoria and Albert Museum) she secured not only an exhibition in 1865 but, a few years later, studio space, and she was the first photographic artist to be collected by the institution. Arresting Beauty features prints from its initial purchase and from subsequent additions to its holdings, which have grown to number nearly one thousand. The exhibition includes Cameron’s large camera lens (all that survives of her apparatus), pages from her unfinished memoir manuscript Annals of My Glass House, and portraits she made in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) after Cameron and her husband moved there in 1875.

The Morgan Library and Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, New York, NY Info

If you would like to subscribe to DART: Design Arts Daily, please go here