Interview with Candida Alvarez: Mapping Interventions
In 1953, a young Celia Gonzalez boarded a plane in Puerto Rico, escorted by her distant cousin Maximino Alvarez, to stay with her cousin who had helped her secure a factory job in NYC. At that time, young women could not travel alone, so she was entrusted to her cousin (since he had been a soldier in the Korean War and could speak English). His parents, Celedoina and Pedro Alvarez were already residents in Brooklyn. Although Celia and Maximino were related, they were strangers to each other, but that historic plane ride led to a marriage. Like Maximino’s parents, they settled in Brooklyn and started a family. All three of their children were born in February. The middle child was Candida Alvarez. Maximino landed a job working in the mail room at Cumberland Hospital, which was within walking distance from where they lived. In time, he became manager.
Young Alvarez family in the 1950s. Candida on the far right.
Courtesy of the artist.
We grew up in the Farragut Housing Projects located on Bridge Street in downtown Brooklyn close to the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. We lived on the top floor, the 14th floor. It was a long apartment with two bedrooms. My brother slept in the living room. I shared a room with my sister. My father worked several jobs to put us through private school. I spoke Spanish until I started school. My mother always spoke to us in Spanish. Once I started school, there were very few friends who could speak Spanish, so I became more fluent in English.
ArtStyle: How do you trace your roots? What is your relationship to Puerto Rico where your parents live now and you never lived, versus Brooklyn where you grew up and they don’t live any more?
Candida Alvarez (CA): I first went to Puerto Rico when I was in my 20s with two school friends who were also Puerto Ricans raised in New York. We stayed in San Juan because I did’nt know my relatives there that well. That included my abuelo (grandfather) who had remarried and I had never met. They all lived in Ponce in the southern part of the Island. It’s the second largest city after San Juan. What I remember from Puerto Rico from that time was the heat and how green everything was. When I stepped out of the plane, the air was hot and heavy. It was like being inside of an oven. The beach water was turquoise and so clear I could see my feet. It was lovely.
My parents moved back to Puerto Rico in the early 1990s shortly after my son was born. It was their dream to move back and build a home there. They were both raised in the same vicinity with lots of mango trees.
Buena Vista. 2002. Acrylic on linen, 77″ x 63″. Courtesy of the artist.
ArtStyle: Where is home for you now?
CA: Home is where my son is.
ArtStyle: Where or how does Chicago fit in? Do you have roots here?
CA: When I lived in Brooklyn, I came to Chicago regularly to visit friends, family and to visit the art fairs. I never dreamed it would be home for me. However, I applied for a teaching job at the Art Institute in 1998 and got it. Now, I am a tenured professor in the Painting and Drawing Department. This is home for now.
ArtStyle: Now let us talk about Candida Alvarez the artist. Any thoughts on what led you into this field?
CA: I loved the solitude it required. I was always a keen observer of everyday life and somehow that fed me. I was always a great problem solver, and making art was a wonderful way to engage in a conversation that has lasted over 30 years.
Installation view. 2007. Tarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University.
Photo credit: Chris Kahler.
Tossing Pennies
Mapping New Territories
Fireflies in an Open Field
In the Dark(for Sol LeWitt)
A Painting and Drawing Intervention by Candida Alvarez
Artstyle: You call your new show at the Tarble Arts Center A Painting and Drawing Intervention. What is the difference between intervention and installation in your view?
CA: This is an intervention because I initiated an occurrence between Sol LeWitt’s drawing and the actual architecture / design of the gallery. It was this mediation that prompted the resultant exhibition. I was not installing anything. I was creating and thinking through to a response.
ArtStyle: What types of materials are used to create the interventions?
CA: Materials used for different parts of the exhibit include paper, embroidery floss, fabric, flashe paint, pencil, digital projection, and charting tape.
ArtStyle: The title of your show includes the name of Sol LeWitt. What kind of relationship did you have with him that explains bringing him into your work?
CA: Last February I gave a lecture at the Tarble Arts Center and then was invited by Mike Watts, the director, to create an exhibition of paintings on the wall. And then on April 8, 2007, Sol LeWitt died. I first met him at the Addison Gallery of American Art in the 1990s when my former husband, Dawoud Bey, and I were artists in residence. Sol was in the midst of preparing for a solo show of painted drawings, and his team of assistants and volunteer students were there. I loved watching his work get made.
Dawoud was asked to photograph Sol, and the photo session went well, despite the fact that Sol never liked to be photographed. It was a beautiful diptych, which included Carol, his wife. Sol wanted to trade a piece with Dawoud for the photo. It was a huge drawing that he sent. That was the beginning of our friendship. From 2000 to 2004, we received Happy New Year drawings on recycled vintage postcards from Sol. In 2003, I decided to take the first postcard drawing and turn it into a black-on-black embroidered floss drawing. I named it Forward and sent it to Sol as a way to say thank you. After he died, I found out he hung it up in his library / music room and kept it in his study where he retreated every afternoon. According to his wife, Carol, he never moved it.
Installation view. 2007. Tarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University.
Photo credit: Chris Kahler.
ArtStyle: What is the story behind the reference to “Pennies and Fireflies in an Open Field”?
CA: Tossing pennies refers to an early childhood experience of watching my dad toss pennies in the air for good luck. It’s also a title for a piece I created at Yale in 1995. I was inspired when I saw Mel Bochner’s exhibit at the Yale Art Gallery in 1995 and finding pennies all over the grad studio floors, which I picked up to use in my work. I was at Yale in the grad program at the time. I tossed pennies in the air and tracked their pathway in paintings that eventually became portraits. It was a conceptual idea of portraits overlaid with a numerical system, which used the alphabet to decipher meaning.
ArtStyle: “Mapping New Territories” is another reference in your show’s title. How does that relate to Sol LeWitt and the pennies?
CA: This way of using memory to get to a conceptual system for painting was a new template for me and my work during the 1990s. This new methodology began at Yale in 1995. Before that in the middle or late 1980s, I was invested in the idea of structure. I was interested in how to get to painting from a series of smaller moves that over time would add up to something bigger. The idea that a painting was a series of actions and gestures that could be assembled to form a singular idea was compelling to me at the time. The notion of compositional structure as an expanding field of possibility became interesting to me as it moved from diptychs to triptychs to polyptychs. I was using the physical structure of medieval altar paintings as a connector to a more cinematic reading as informed by the photographs of Edward Muybridge.
Installation view. 2007. Tarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University.
Photo credit: Chris Kahler.
ArtStyle: So memories of fireflies (from your exhibition title) are one of these actions or gestures?
CA: “Fireflies in an Open Field” refers to this structure. It also triggers a memory from this past summer where I was vacationing in Maine with my son, Ramon. On our first evening there, I glanced out the cottage window and there in the midst of an open field were hundreds of fireflies twinkling. I motioned to my son to have a look. We both stared in awe. It was a beautiful field of twinkling lights at dusk. I wanted the intervention at The Tarble Art Center to place me in a field of wonderment. There are three interventions which refer to this, and they are all on the front wall.
ArtStyle: How did you begin the project?
CA: I wasn’t completely sure how I was going to begin. But I knew my relationship to that space was going to change. Immediately upon entering the room I was trapped in the corners. That is where I started the intervention.
Installation view. 2007. Tarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University.
Photo credit: Chris Kahler.
ArtStyle: You are “In the Dark”?
CA: Yes, I brought Sol’s drawings with me to the site because they gave me the courage to begin. I wanted to intervene in the space in a new way. I wasn’t interested in projecting an image and painting it like a mural. I wanted to activate all the corners of the room like a painting and then slowly discover something in the process.
ArtStyle: What did you do with his drawings? What did you discover?
CA: I discovered that I could use his drawings as a template. It was like gaining a new pair of eyes in the process. The act of projecting and tracing led to new lines, new trajectories. It gave me an opportunity to experiment.
Installation view. 2007. Tarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University.
Photo credit: Chris Kahler.
ArtStyle: So here you are in an unfamiliar place, the Tarble Arts Center’s Gallery, equipped with your own history and holding Sol LeWitt’s drawings in your hand not knowing what is going to happen?
CA: I didn’t know what the final outcome would look like, but I knew I wanted to turn this space into a laboratory of ideas to brew. Art students became available to me as volunteers and that gave my working process some transparency.
ArtStyle: Some kind of dialogue is there between the familiar and the invented?
CA: It helps me create a system of visualization. It simply tracks my thinking, capturing it as a drawing or painting. This methodology of tracking events is important since the work is not begun in an abstract vacuum. There is an internal logic that over time creates a mysterious structure. Yes, the art functions in this terrain between the familiar and the invented.
ArtStyle: As we talk now again you have just finished the project. Where did this dialogue with history and memory take you?
CA: It took me to possibility. I have a sea of ideas to shift through.
Installation view. 2007. Tarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University.
Photo credit: Chris Kahler.
A Painting and Drawing Intervention by Candida Alvarez
November 11 – December 16, 2007
Tarble Arts Center
Eastern Illinois UniversityOpening Reception &
Conversation with the Artist on Sunday, November 11, 2-4 p.m.
Technorati Tags: Puerto Rico, installation, Sol LeWitt, Tarble Arts Center, Edward Muybridge
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the corners and projections are beautiful, i wish i could be there to experience it.
the fragments in the corners remind me of tics…pieces and shards of memory. the solidity of the black corner seems to me like a part of memory that cannot be moved…it shows a permanence and a past. the red peices with the projected lights seem more, “now time”, something current and alive. and the green projection seems to show a moving between the two and a connection, a hanging in the balance. i love the space and the connection it shows…as far as connection between us universally.
lovely, i wish i could be there first hand.
Candida is a true inspiration on what one can achieve in life! I will have to quote her to my students about being a keen observer.
what a wonderful interview! thank you so much for bringing such a wonderful artist to our attention. i too will be sharing this with my writing students to help them understand the inner mapping that goes on in the making of art… the necessary and personal journey of birthing something true. thanks again!
It’s cerebral fun stuff, and challenging. Somehow, I feel transported by this work and can connect to Candida’s play of light and whimsy.
I love that Candida’s language is art and that we, the observer, can share in her passion.
I admire and enjoy the development of your work. I love the abundant air, life and spirit the inclusion of the environment and the past - so much of the new work is what it is about!
Thank you for sending this interview and set of images to me
Candida!
Clarity, beauty, playfulness are the qualities that resonate with essential aesthetic and intellectual values have been Candida’s trademark. Yet, upon closer observation and consideration, even within those works pictured that initially appear direct and obvious reveal complex subtlety in her decision-making processes. It is indeed a joy to note with earnest her intellectual substance pairing with visual delight, as they seep, sometimes immediately, but often slowly, into one’s consciousness.
Her body of work gives extended meaning to the that style of “Conceptualism” deeply rooted by a parallel set of developments emerging from Minimalism - the philosophically rigorous approach to the making of art which sought in direct experience a new foundation for art’s enormously honest way of working.
Congratulations! I’m sorry I’ll not to be able to join in the gala celebration at her opening.
Sol Lewitt’s influence is significant, Candida; I hope a book will follow your exhibition.
It’s probably too obvious to say so, but this interview is an art lesson, and I want to thank you both. Candida articulates, beautifully, an approach to art making I hope to always remember, to accept the challenge as fresh every time. Treat all the work and each space into which it will live as if you have all the memory and experience of all your time as a practicing artist, but without pre-conceptions, pre-conditions and limitations, keeping an open and intelligent mindset throughout the process. Making the problem solving so important that the fear (that is always present for me, anyway) is subjected to a rear seat. See what you get when you are done!
One of the most discouraging but meaningful aspects of creating art is the struggle. Hearing Candida discuss her struggle in making this installation is very important to me. It makes the installation more real. It makes me realize that every artist hits a roadblock during the process, but the struggle is what makes you move further.
Beautiful comments and show Candida. Thanks for continuing on with your vision as well as for sending this.
Thanks to all of you who have taken out the time to write your thoughts. I really appreciate the invaluable communication that this forum provides. I must admit this is my first blog and I am finding it a wonderful extension of the conversation that I began quietly with myself, never knowing what would be the outcome of such a commitment.
You the viewer are allowing me to witness the reverberation that can take place when there is an opportunity for exchange. I want to thank Anna Joelsdottir for her perceptive questions that made this a rewarding experience for me!
Sweet story and such an interesting interview. Thank you for giving us info about your interests and history.
Candida,
I appreciate being able to see these images…what a beautiful project…congrats!
Deborah
It was such a wonderful experience to watch this project grow. I enjoyed seeing the final result the other day and it was even more fullfilling being in the space and experiencing it first hand. The show is so poetic and quiet, what a beautiful show. Best of luck on your new journey!
Candida,
Your intervention brings energy, wisdom, guts and most of all a beautiful silence. The opportunity to discover your life as an artist through your stories was an honor. Thank you for trusting in me to listen and record. I wish you the best!
Kathryn
Candida,
For me the best part of your work is the green ghostly light, because in a way, there is ghost of Sol Lewitt behind the work; it works as concept and form. best.
SEVAL
Candida,
The birthing of your intervention was quite memorable for me. I had the opportunity to experience it at different stages of its life. It was my pleasure to soak up the space and understand and listen to the inaudible movement within the walls. Your tranquility resonates.
Marc
One week has passed since I experienced the site-specific work of Candida Alvarez at the Tarble Art Center in Eastern Illinois. I drove 3 hours from Chicago to see the work in homage of Sol LeWitt and was gratefully surprised.
Upon entering the Tarble Center I noticed a separate entrance within that led to the exhibition space. Before entering a curious yellow intervention made apparent the space I was leaving and entering. Instantly I was overcome by my own presence. Alvarez turned the interior into a shared space. A projected screen saver that seemed to be intentionally blurred began and ended what I like to call the hum of bliss. An artist’s goal or the indefinable essence of truth or the defining moment that you can call art. This notion is constant and seems to be unattainable in the present, although Alvarez kept this very thought in check. Appearing to be dancing on the wall, drawing endlessly like one of the amazing LeWitt wall drawings. I was taken by the parallel, which seemed to be executed with ease. The everyday nature of the line and the screen saver humorously meshed eras of thought. Alvarez’s consideration for the aura of Sol, the viewer, and honoring both in the moment was the collaborative surprise that made the haul all worthwhile. The word that kept coming to me, then and today is generosity. As an artist who does not revel in authorship I consider myself to be mediocre in making/moving FOR THE VIEWER. The moves made by Alvarez suggested a participatory invitation by carefully composing the space. Nearing 2008, the act of giving seems to be the direction of NOW artists and I aspire to board. Giving the space right back to the viewer was what I admire about the extensive work of Sol LeWitt. He made evident our place and equated it with his, which was what I experienced at the Tarble.
Dear Candida,
This was one of the most engaging interviews I have ever read and I agree with so many of the previous comments that this exchange is a wonderful and articulate art lesson on the process of art making from inspiration to realization. Watch out you have become an art historian’s artist — we all hope for such a clearly explained path from most art, especially, the really good stuff!
Congratulations on a stunning show,
Kym