Candida Alvarez’s Circle, Point, Hoop at El Museo del Barrio gets its title from a 1996 collage-painting by the artist. The understated work — a dark blue circle adorned with white string threaded through nails — is a stark contrast to the vibrant mosaics of color that suggest stained glass in more recent paintings. Yet its circular form and continuous threading suggest the connectedness of each period in her life as an artist.Alvarez’s first large-scale museum survey spans styles and media across nearly a half century. Born in New York City to parents from Puerto Rico, the works reflect the artist’s Diasporican identity and her upbringing in the Farragut Houses, a public housing complex in Brooklyn, with many cultural traditions her parents retained from Puerto Rico. Memory is visualized in her art, but it often hovers on the cusp of representation. Early works on view evoke the artist as a childhood observer, seeing the world through a window in her family’s 14th-floor apartment or watching the rituals of adults. In “Bolero” (1984), a textured surface creates a dreamlike atmosphere for a dancing couple rendered in soft, jewel hues; another dreamlike painting, “Soy (I am) Boricua” (1989), shows a young woman in a window amid kaleidoscopic swirls of color that hint at a landscape without cohering into one.Candida Alvarez, “Soy (I Am) Boricua” (1989), acrylic and oil on 2 wood panels (courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, photograph by Tom Van Eynde) Though loosely chronological, the exhibition is smartly organized by theme, offering insight into the through lines that interweave seemingly disparate works. These range from, for instance, the atmospheric chiaroscuro of the John Street charcoal drawings (1988) and manic scratched surface of the grisaille abstract painting “Stretching, Nesting, Reaching, Feeling” (1992) to the jubilant lime-green orbs that populate “Ramon” (1996), named for her son, to the mixed-media collages of The Hybrid Series (1982).Throughout her oeuvre, abstraction and representation bleed into one another in the same way that memories momentarily coagulate into images before dissolving again. A recent show at Gray Gallery,Real Monsters in Bold Colors (April 30–July 3), foregrounded this effect, pairing Alvarez’s paintings with those of Bob Thompson; as Thompson’s figurative works brought out hints of figuration in Alvarez’s abstract pieces, her paintings coaxed Thompson’s figures further from representation.Installation view of Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop at El Museo del Barrio. Left: “Bolero” (1984), acrylic on canvas; right: “Girl Ironing Her Hair” (Muchacha planchándose el pelo) (1984), acrylic on paper (photo Valentina di Liscia/Hyperallergic)Alvarez’s most recent pieces, featured in the Gray Gallery show with a few examples included in this exhibition, trade the sense of architectural space in much of her earlier art for cartographic space — in “Partly Cloudy” and “Clear” (both 2023), irregular shapes that fit together like puzzle pieces map a topography dominated by bucolic blues and greens. The works reflect her move in 2021 to a home studio on six acres of land in southwestern Michigan, not far from the Lake Michigan coastline. They also project a sense of calm after the untethered energy of her multicolored Air Paintings (2017–19), two-sided works painted on PVC mesh and hung in freestanding aluminum frames. The pieces, with their loose washes of color and tentative forms, process a series of traumatic events — above all, Hurricane Maria’s devastation to Puerto Rico, where the artist has family, and the passing of her father. “Estoy Bien”(2017), defined by soft, dusty pinks and amorphous shapes, offers a gentle, if impermanent, respite from the chaos. The title refers to a common refrain she heard from Puerto Ricans following the hurricane: “I’m fine.” Though born of pain, the Air Paintings are buoyed by color and light; they go beyond perseverance to convey the transformative power of art in life. As she says in her personal statement, “I use personal knowledge to build magical dimensions.”Candida Alvarez, “Estoy Bien” (I’m Fine) (2017), latex, ink, acrylic and enamel on PVC mesh with aluminum (photo Valentina di Liscia/Hyperallergic)Candida Alvarez, “Mary in the Sky with Diamonds” (Mary en el cielo con diamantes) (2005), acrylic and enamel on canvas (photo Valentina di Liscia/Hyperallergic)Candida Alvarez, “Wish Me Luck” (Deséame suerte) (1997/2025), metal graters, stencils, annatto seeds, and pennies (photo Valentina di Liscia/Hyperallergic)Installation view of Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop at El Museo del Barrio (photo Valentina di Liscia/Hyperallergic)Candida Alvarez, “John Street Series #12” from the John Street Series (1988), charcoal on paper; Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York (photograph Matthew Sherman/courtesy El Museo del Barrio, New York)Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop continues at El Museo del Barrio (1230 Fifth Avenue, East Harlem, Manhattan) through August 3. The exhibition was curated by Rodrigo Moura and Zuna Maza with Alexia Arrizurieta.