I’m excited that this book on the work of Candida Alvarez is out via the Green Lantern Press! Co-edited by myself and Fulla Abdul-Jabbar with a selection of articles on Alvarez from 1983 to the present; conversations between Alvarez and Dawoud Bey, Kay Rosen, Daniel Schulman, and Rebecca Walker; and newly commissioned texts including a prose response by Elizabeth Alexander as well as essays by the exhibition’s curator, Terry R. Myers, and art historians Kellie Jones and Daniel R. Quiles. The book is inspired by Alvarez’s first major institutional exhibition, curated by Myers, at the Chicago Cultural Center. The show, Candida Alvarez. Here, reflected forty years of her painting. Embracing and further contextualizing her work, Candida Alvarez: Here. A Visual Reader features full-color reproductions of individual artworks and views of the exhibition as well as images from her Fall/Winter 2017 menswear collaboration with Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons. Copies available through SPD. 

About the artist: Candida Alvarez is an artist who responds through intuition and imagination to intimate moments in life. Her paintings, drawings, and collages blur the boundaries between the conceptual, the intuitive and the abstract. Alvarez received a MFA from the Yale School of Art in Painting and Printmaking in 1997. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in the summer of 1981 and received her BA from Fordham University, Lincoln Center, in 1977. Her work is currently in the public collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Alvarez holds the distinguished F. H. Sellers Professorship in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. During 2010–12, she was interim Graduate Dean at SAIC. She is represented by Gavlak, Los Angeles/Palm Beach, and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago. Alvarez is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation 2019 Painters & Sculptors Grant.

This book was produced with support from The Chicago Community Trust, Paula and Jim Crown, Denise and Gary Gardner, Sarah Gavlak, The Effata Foundation, Shirley and Walter Massey, and Monique Meloche.