Candida Alvarez

F.H. Sellers Professor, Painting and Drawing

candidaalvarez.com

Candida Alvarez has been teaching at SAIC since 1998. She took her sabbatical during the 2020 Academic Year.

Throughout her career, Candida Alvarez has worked with acrylic paint, enamel, fabric, and PVC mesh to create her highly experimental and innovative paintings, sculptures, and collages. Her paintings incorporate multiple layers of vibrant color and complicated shapes to create abstract and figurative forms that draw from personal memories, the history of painting, and everyday life. Alvarez’s process involves an engagement with what she calls an active search–exploring the world through an unremitting curiosity and paying close attention to what may often be considered ordinary. Her use of color and silhouette also draws from the aesthetics of kitsch, cartoons, and the handcrafted. The result is a blurring of boundaries between the abstract, the conceptual, and the intuitive.

Alvarez was born in Brooklyn, New York, and is currently based in Chicago, Illinois, and Baroda, Michigan. In 2021 she was awarded the Helen Frankenthaler Award for Painting by the Foundation for Contemporary Art, NY, and was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painter and Sculptors Grant in 2019. Alvarez was recently named as one of the 2022 Latinx Artists Fellows by the Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. Her work is included in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Pérez Art Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Whitney Museum. Alvarez was appointed as the F.H. Sellers Chair in Painting at SAIC in 2019.

Alvarez is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, and Gavlak LA|Palm Beach.

Education

2012 Communications Media, European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland
1997 MFA Painting and Printmaking, Yale University School of Art
1981 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
1977 BA Studio Art/ Liberal Arts, Fordham University

Notable Classes Taught:

Contemporary Art in New York: Connecting the Dots (with Daniel Quiles and Lan Tuazon)
New York is Still #1: Contemporary Art in NY (with Terry R. Myers)

More info:

15 Latinx Artist Fellows Receive $50K Grants
American Academy of Fine Arts and Letters 2022 Art Award Winners
Catching up with Candida Alvarez
Gavlak Gallery
Mellon Foundation
Monique Meloche Gallery

Sabbatical Reflection

My sabbatical during 2019-2020 was truly phenomenal. I was newly appointed the FH Sellers Chair in Painting with a research stipend, when an opportunity came up to travel to Umbria and study the frescoes of Piero della Francesca while living at the legendary Civitella Ranieri Foundation Castle for a week in November. I returned to Chicago to prepare for my first solo exhibition at the Monique Meloche Gallery, opening that February with a new body of double sided paintings, referred to as “Air Paintings” that rested within aluminum frames, liberated from the wall. In March, I traveled with the gallery to the Independent Fair, NYC to install new paintings inspired by my trip to Umbria. “The Vision Paintings” was a series of 20 paintings, 20 x 20 inches square, made during the year 2020. It was a successful event, but unfortunately, we returned back to Chicago on the heels of the Covid-19 epidemic. Because of the sabbatical, I escaped that Fall semester, filled with so many unknowns. To stay safe, I temporarily moved out of my beautiful Pilsen studio to work from my home studio, borrowing a French easel to work on smaller paintings, and creating drawings on my kitchen table. The work kept me going, as everything around me was falling apart. I missed my friends, family, and colleagues. After 6 months, thanks to the generosity of friends, I drove to Michigan and was in residence for a month. That magical experience ultimately led to a spontaneous studio/home relocation. With new keys in hand on Thanksgiving Day, 2020, any lingering bits of buyers’ remorse was quickly pushed aside in December, with the news that I was anonymously awarded the unrestricted 2021 Helen Frankenthaler Award for Painting from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. I returned to virtual teaching in Spring of 2021, zooming from my new home in Michigan.

I am grateful for the William Bronson Mitchell and Grace Slovet Mitchell Enhancement Fund Award for the 2021-2022 academic year which allowed me to finish a new body of 10 paintings entitled Palimpsest, which were exhibited September to November of 2021 in LA at Gavlak Gallery with a catalog essay by Sue Spaid to be released shortly. Currently, I am in preparation for my second solo exhibition at Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago to open Fall of 2023. I will be graduate advising in the spring of 2023.

-Candida Alvarez, F.H. Sellers Professor, Painting and Drawing