Candida Alvarez’s painting has evolved over five decades through an exploration of abstraction, figuration, and the fluid territory between them. Working with acrylic, Flashe, enamel, and ink on supports ranging from canvas to cotton placemats and vellum, she has developed a richly layered visual language. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and El Museo del Barrio. Her distinctions include the Trellis Art Fund Award (2024), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award (2022), the Latinx Artist Fellowship (2022), the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Award, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. Recent exhibitions include Stretching Nesting Reaching Feeling at Monira Foundation at Mana Contemporary, Chicago (2024), and no existe un mundo poshuracán at the Whitney Museum, New York (2022–23). She earned a BFA from Fordham University in 1977 and an MFA from Yale School of Art in 1997. Professor Emerit at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she taught there for twenty-five years and lives and works between Brooklyn and Chicago.