“B is for Birds in the Bronx,” a series of faceted glass windscreen panels, was inspired by the birds that populate the Bronx. While they aren’t always noticed, birds are present in our urban environment, filling the air with song and the sky with flight. The artist, Candida Alvarez makes the birds prominent through her use of scale and composition, placing the birds in the foreground but almost treating the birds as negative space. As Alvarez explained, "I wanted to subvert them by making them white, and make them invisible, large and regal. The birds in their emptiness give attention to their transparency and how they hold a space for the trees, the bushes, the snow, the branches, the wind, the sky, and the leaves to exist, like a still-life painting... where the space outside of the object, really creates the form of the object... "

The child of Puerto Rican immigrants, Candidate Alvarez was born in Brooklyn and went on to earn her graduate degree through Yale’s MFA program. Alvarez’s work is highly regarded for her conceptual and intuitive approach to transforming to pop culture references and historical events into fodder for abstraction. Using an experimental combination of abstract and figurative forms, Alvarez’s paintings employ silhouettes and bold colors. While Alvarez is primarily recognized as a painter, her practice spans sculpture, collage, drawings, photography, printmaking, and installation. Her works are widely exhibited and can be found in numerous collections, notably the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. After establishing her career in New York, Alvarez relocated to Chicago, where she also taught as a tenured professor at the School of Art Institute of Chicago.