Candida Alvarez takes viewers back in time through art history and into her own memory in “Multihyphenate,” the artist’s second exhibition at moniquemeloche. The work was created at a combination of her Michigan studio, a residency in Arles, France at the LUMA Foundation, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. “‘Multihyphenate’ is a beautiful word. I saw it first in a Harper’s Bazaar profile of this model,” Alvarez says about the show’s title. “It’s kinda sexy! As a mother, a daughter, a professor, a painter, I thought ‘Whoa, I’m a multihyphenate!’”
Alvarez, originally from New York, has taught at the Art Institute of Chicago since 1988 and has exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Whitney, and ICA Boston across her forty-plus-year career. However, rather than critics, curators, or Chicago art glitterati, the guest of honor at “Multihyphenate” was none other than Alvarez’s mother. “My mother never got to be a part of my process,” Alvarez says, recalling how 2023 was also the very first time her mother got to meet Meloche, view her studio, and really engage with her artistic practice. For the works in “Multihyphenate,” Alvarez used iPhone photography of her mother to deconstruct and remake images of her, some inspired by the composition of Raphael’s “Madonna in the Chair.”
