Candida Alvarez awarded Latinx Artist Fellowship

The Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation today announced the newest cohort of the Latinx Artist Fellowship—a multiyear initiative administered by the US Latinx Art Forum (USLAF) in collaboration with the New York Foundation for the Arts. In its second year, the fellowship recognizes 15 of the most compelling Latinx visual artists working in the United States today, and aims to address a systemic lack of support, visibility, and patronage of Latinx visual artists—individuals of Latin American or Caribbean descent, born or living in the United States. 

The 2022 Fellowship class was chosen to reflect the diversity that exists within the Latinx community, highlighting the practices of women-identified, queer, and non-binary artists, as well as those from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, ranging from Chicanx and Ecuadorian-American to Afro-Cuban and Indigenous. The cohort includes artists working in locations such as Baroda, Michigan; Farmington, New Mexico; San Antón, Carolina, Puerto Rico; and Nashville, Tennessee, while the aesthetic practices represented by the fellows span installation art, abstraction, and performance, as well as contemporary craft, textile, and fiber-based work. Deliberately intergenerational, it is equally divided between emerging, mid-career, and established artists.

Puerto Rican-American and Brooklyn raised, Chicago based painter and visual artist Candida Alvarez explores both interior and exterior landscapes in her bright and abstract work. Alvarez’ work has been notably exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Hyde Park Art Center, and at Gavlak Gallery.

Candida Alvarez is widely regarded as one of her generation’s most highly innovative and experimental painters; her paintings and drawings are complex and vibrantly layered with color and shapes built from combinations of abstract and figurative forms that are rich in memory and reveal history and references to everyday life.

“Having run away from seemingly inadequate definitions for abstract painting, I find myself immersed in a relationship that tracks, exchanges, and shreds the world of news, front-page photography, design, and pictorial memory into a subject-less pictorial mash-up. In essence, there is no more picture; there is only painting.”  -  Candida Alvarez

Alvarez’ work has been featured at The Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Riverside Arts Center, Museo de Arte, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, The Currier Gallery of Art, Peregrine Program, The Bronx Museum of Art, and Gavlak Gallery. Candida Alvarez is a recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, the New York Foundation for the Art Artists’ Fellowship, and the Mid-Atlantic-NEA Regional Fellowship. Her work is included in the collections of The Addison Gallery of American Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, El Museo Del Barrio, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and The Readers Digest, among others.