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Well, someone lets the color talk. I mean really talk \u2014 not whisper, not behave. Candida Alvarez, in her Circle, Point, Hoop retrospective at El Museo del Barrio, lets it all loose: the fuchsia and the ochre, the emerald and the cherry pit black \u2014 memory\u2019s palette, diaspora\u2019s pulse, abstraction\u2019s flirt with figuration. And the show? It spins like a kid in a living room trying to make the whole world dizzy.<\/p>\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nYou walk in and there\u2019s a sense of return. Of looping back, like a hoop rolling through the city streets of Brooklyn or around the rural quiet of Baroda, Michigan. Alvarez\u2019s journey \u2014 Brooklyn to Chicago, then back again \u2014 is a kind of cosmology built on windows: the ones she stared through as a girl in the Farragut Houses, watching the BQE twist like ribbon, and the ones she peers through now, out to the woods where blackbirds flash like brushstrokes. It\u2019s all in the paintings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What I love is that Alvarez makes memory work \u2014 not as a soft-focus reverie, but like a muscle, a vibrant system. \u201cShe Went Round and Round\u201d (1983\u201384) could\u2019ve been me or you or any kid spinning in a cramped apartment \u2014 blurred arms like Muybridge frames, dizziness as a kind of freedom, the floor giving way to dream. The room is hers, yes, but we know that light. That blur. That music.<\/p>\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThere’s something about Candida’s paintings that won\u2019t be contained. She\u2019s a big-canvas artist when it matters (thank you Jack Whitten), and when it\u2019s intimate, she goes right into the napkin drawer \u2014 literally. Embroidering memories onto linen like spells, tiny and holy. It\u2019s not art therapy, please \u2014 it\u2019s poetic inventory. A child\u2019s boat. A nursery rhyme. A bright toy elephant sailing through the tide of her son’s childhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then there are the circles. Loops in her titles, her brushwork, her life. The title piece \u2014 Circle, Point, Hoop \u2014 pulls from a 1996 painting, but it might as well describe her whole way of seeing: symbolic, playful, and rigorous without being stiff. She\u2019s like a jazz musician with a sewing kit and a subway map, threading together gesture and geography and the divine ridiculousness of being both here and from there.<\/p>\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nHer identity as \u201cDiasporican\u201d isn\u2019t some term cooked up for a curatorial pitch; it\u2019s lived. It\u2019s the stained-glass light of St. Ann\u2019s Church mingling with the reflection off car hoods. It\u2019s salsa in the kitchen and silence in the studio. And it\u2019s all woven into this exhibition \u2014 not as an \u201cidentity\u201d show, god help us, but as a life show. Alvarez doesn\u2019t illustrate where she\u2019s from \u2014 she metabolizes it. You feel it in the color, in the texture, in the way her lines know when to shout and when to hush.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The curators \u2014 Rodrigo Moura, Zuna Maza, and Alexia Arrizurieta \u2014 do well not to over-direct. The show breathes. It lets you wander through Alvarez\u2019s timeline like you\u2019re flipping through someone else\u2019s dream journal (but the kind where you do recognize every entry). There are over 100 works here \u2014 a sprawl of paintings, drawings, sculpture, napkin-poems, and lived history. But the show doesn\u2019t feel crowded. It feels generous.<\/p>\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nAnd of course she\u2019s back at El Museo. Of course. This is where she studied in the ’70s, back when the walls were louder and the art was an argument. Now she\u2019s back \u2014 teacher, mother, legend \u2014 and the place glows with the echo of her beginnings. She\u2019s mentored so many (Rashid Johnson, hello) and watched abstraction stretch to accommodate all these new voices. And here she is, not in the margins, but center court. Hoop, point, circle \u2014 and nothing wasted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The works aren\u2019t afraid of beauty. Or mess. Or joy. Black Cherry Pit is like a joke with a philosophical punchline. Her \u201cSunny\u201d paintings \u2014 inspired by portraits of her mother \u2014 make domestic space feel sainted, lit by memory and not nostalgia. Komal Shah\u2019s right: there\u2019s power in Alvarez\u2019s scale, but there\u2019s joy too. So much joy.<\/p>\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nFrankly, I left wanting to paint, which never happens. Or at least to look harder \u2014 at the green of Central Park, or the sunlight on the Hudson River. Because Candida Alvarez reminds us that to see the world clearly, we might have to spin around a bit. Get dizzy. Tilt our heads like a question mark. She makes the overlooked luminous and the abstract tender. She makes the city \u2014 and the diaspora, and the forest, and the kitchen table \u2014 feel like one long, looping sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And maybe that\u2019s what this show is. A sentence. An ongoing one. Color punctuating memory. Texture interrupting silence. The hoop keeps rolling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n