Candida Alvarez with Terry R. Myers

Candida Alvarez Candida Alvarez is a Puerto Rican artist and educator from Brooklyn. She makes paintings and drawings that blur the boundaries between the conceptual, the intuitive and the abstract. Complex and vibrantly layered with color and shapes built from combinations of abstract and figurative forms rich in memory, painting history and references to everyday life. Her work has been collected by the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Whitney Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, among others. Among other awards, Alvarez was recently granted the Arts and Letters Award in Art by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Alvarez is currently the F.H. Sellers Professor in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has taught since 1998.

Los Angeles-based writer and independent curator Terry R. Myers is an Editor-at-Large at the Brooklyn Rail. Recent curatorial projects include the survey exhibition Candida Alvarez: Here at the Chicago Cultural Center. Myers has held faculty positions at institutions including Art Center College of Design, Otis College of Art and Design, Pratt Institute, the Royal College of Art, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was chair of painting and drawing.