When Candida Alvarez unveiled her monumental public work Howlings—Soft Paintings in August 2017 as a part of Chicago’s Year of Public Art, the tropical storm that would become Hurricane Maria had not yet coalesced over the Atlantic Ocean. Alvarez, who was born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents in 1955 and moved to the Windy City in 1998, had recently celebrated a major exhibition, “Here,” at the Chicago Cultural Center, and the display of her latex-on-PVC mural on the banks of the Chicago River represented a high point in her long-running efforts to make abstract painting relevant for a wide

A mass of snarled tree roots girdles the middle stretch of a long, galvanized-steel fence post in Harold Mendez’s but I sound better since you cut my throat, 2017. Juxtapositions of organic materials with “artifacts” culled from different contexts characterized the artist’s sparse and contemplative installation spanning two modestly sized adjoining galleries at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts. The subtly bent and twisted pole, wedged at a forty-five-degree angle between the floor and the ceiling, crosscut the white cube’s volume and evoked the iconic architectural interventions of