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The Latin Third Person
John Haberin New York City
Candida Alvarez and Mestre Didi
Candida Alvarez had a habit of speaking of herself in the third person. She Loved to Dream, a title went. She Went Round and Round. She was that Girl Ironing Her Hair.
But who was she? That girl going round is multiplying her arms like an anatomical study or a deity. Maybe a true artist would aspire to both. That girl born to Puerto Rican parents in Brooklyn had to decide whether to iron her hair or to take pride in not being able to keep it straight. 
The dreamer may have wondered where to look to find her dreams. At El Museo del Barrio across from Mestre Didi, she may hardly know whether to look up close and personal or off into the distance to "Circle, Point, Hoop," while Didi stays ever so close amid Brazilian art and dance.
Self, family, and the Beatles
Candida Alvarez must have taken Socrates seriously when he asked followers to "know thyself," but she could not have found it easy. Born in 1955, she came of age just when critically acclaimed artists were refusing to try. Remember the "Pictures generation"? They were making pictures, not confessions. They and others were putting painting and art institutions to the test. And then there was this kid from Vinegar Hill near Dumbo, a child of the projects, not so near the action but unable to let go.
She could speak, too, in the first person. Identity was newly part of the picture, too, for women of color in the arts, and she had a breakthrough in 1989 with Soy Boricua, "I am a Puerto Rican American." Inset to the upper left of a seeming abstraction is a child, black skinned and wide eyed. Look again and that image, after a family photo, becomes a larger portrait's left eye, a dark color her left, more colorful passages her hips. She asked to know abstract painting and not just black abstraction inside and out. She made all the right moves and got her MFA at Yale in 1997.
That painting is one in a series of diptychs, one panel above the other. Colors change abruptly across the edge, and acrylic stains sink right in and shine right out. So do bright reds speckled with thicker paint, for She Wore Red to the Senior Prom. Elsewhere Alvarez gives up color completely in favor of black or shadowy grays dotted with white. She is out to connect the dots. As her brush curves freely across the surface, she is also speaking through symbols, and who knows what they represent?
In truth, she has no firm set of symbols, just an urge to let painting speak for itself. She experiments with Flashe, the rubber based paint, and a weave so thick that her canvas might be a net for the unwary. It is also her "air painting" and a way of letting light pass through. She is always improvisational, with smears on the surface and kitchen graters here and there on the floor. She calls an early series her hybrids, and never mind if you cannot say hybrids of what. As yet another title has it, Wish Me Luck.
She finds an anchor throughout in modern art. Body fragments evoke Surrealism, while Minimalism returns in black and white. Sparer paintings with the grain of wood as ground recall Paul Klee, Max Ernst, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. The show's title work recalls the modern mantra of point, line, and plane. Still, she is the Puerto Rican telling stories and the New Yorker heading for the prom. She appeared before at the Whitney in "Puerto Rican art after Hurricane Maria," and it is all Nueva York.
Not that Alvarez appears all that much. She herself may find it hard to follow Socrates, and her frequent shifts make it hard to pin her down. The curators, Rodrigo Moura and Zuna Maza with Alexia Arrizurieta, proceed more or less chronologically and by series, but the attempt defeats even them. Still, both her stories and her colors keep their shine. Mary in the Sky with Diamonds pays tribute to her mother-in-law, and the barbs in her circle of string, nails, gouache, and wood still have their bite. In a collision of cultures, she could know herself, family, and the Beatles.
Keep on dancing
At El Museo del Barrio, the dancing never stops. Put it down to a museum with a taste for local cultures in New York and the Americas, wherever its exhibitions care to go. Put it down, too, to the technological magic of video, which still captures dance in Brazil in 1980. It need never quit the length of a museum wall or the entirety of museum hours in remembering Salvador da Bahia, where Mestre Didi dedicated his life to "Spiritual Form." Put it down most of all to a country where none can escape the carnival and few would dream of trying. 
A retrospective reaches out to embrace all manner of dancing, in life and in art.
Depending on which way you enter, the dance may precede him. Didi, born Deoscóredes Maximiliano dos Santos, was still just hitting his stride when Arlete Soares gathered her fellow dancers to put on a show. They may press singly toward the picture plane in black and white or weave in a tightly choreographed mass. Their white dresses only emphasize their body weight. The mestre was lighter in weight in more ways than one. His sculpture stands tall, lean, and just as active at the center of each room.
Just thirty works hold the floor, sharing the museum with the larger retrospective of Candida Alvarez. Leather-bound sheaves form decorative patterns touched by flowers in photos the size of the wall. Beneath it lie still more patterns in reproduction with much the same motifs. A step inside the show has it coming actively into being. In another photo, you can see him binding the tapestry in palm ribs. Again the dance and the layering keep coming.
He works calmly and steadily. These are his orishas, or "scepters," and he is weaving a "sacred site" in deference. This is solid ground, populated by ziggurats and cowrie shells, but the patterns are largely planar. Didi showed his work easily back then, but Bahia is not Rio, and he has largely fallen off the map, at least in New York. He died in 2013 well into his nineties. Here, though, he can once again serve as a gathering place for local artists, Yoruba tradition, and himself.
The curators, Rodrigo Moura and Ayrson Heráclitof with Chloë Courtney, treat the occasion as a group show of nearly a dozen other mischief makers, like the dancers from forty-five years ago. This is not a survey of Brazilian art, which has had no shortage of attention with its woven histories, South American architecture, and photographic "Fotoclubismo." Shows have focused on such artists as Hélio Oiticica, Tarsila do Amaral, Lygia Clark, and Lygia Pape. Didi's version of Latin American art skipped the carnival in Rio in search of the spiritual. It shares its strategies with others all the same as recently as today. It obliges one to think harder about what they have in common behind him on the wall.
They may work with bold geometric abstraction like Rubem Valentim or, like Goya Lopes, in silkscreen on red floral textiles. They may turn to craft, like Nádia Taquary in basketry and beads. They may have freestanding geometric sculpture, like Emanoel Araújo, or dark cast metal masks like Agnaldo Manoel dos Santos flat to the wall. Jorge dos Anjos tells stories in ink, while paintings by Abdias Nascimento are colorful, mythic, and playful. Antonio Oloxedê creates scepters of his own. Like Didi, they see no contradiction between the spiritual and the dance.
Candida Alvarez ran at El Museo del Barrio through August 3, 2025, Mestre Didi through July 13.