Time Lapse
2011
Halo-Halo: Bay Area Artists of the Philippine Diaspora
UH University of Hawaii (Oahu, HI)
A Poet of Visual Metaphor
For nearly fifty years Carlos Villa has explored the meaning of cultural diversity in his art and in doing so has expanded our awareness of what we consider as “multicultural.” What began in his early career as an attempt to understand his own heritage–a complexity of Filipino traditions with its layered strains of Asian, African, Indian and Oceanic cultures, along with influences of a Western artistic tradition–became over time an exercise in creating his own visual anthropology to represent his personal background, and, in a broader sense, the dynamics of intercultural weaving.
— Preston Fletcher
“The Artists Feet”, Carlos Villa
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Carlos Villa of the San Francisco Art Institute will visit the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo Art Department this week as the department’s Artist-In-Residence, October 10-14, 2011.
Villa, a visual artist and long-time community resource teacher and producer in San Francisco, California will deliver two lectures on his symposia “Worlds in Collision” and his personal journey from a “singular discipline trajectory to interventions and actions that would allow me to become a viable conduit between minoritized artist communities and the artist mainstream.”
Villa’s visit coincides with the Art Department Gallery presentation “Halo-Halo: Bay Area Artists of the Philippine Diaspora.” The exhibit will feature a mix of mature and emerging San Francisco Bay Area Filipino-American artists who work in a range of traditional and community based conceptual or experimental strategies to directly address questions of Filipino and Filipino-American identity and community or more subtle messages conveyed in the use of embedded or implied relations.
The presentation’s underlying theme is heritage awareness developed in ways that will inspire and challenge viewers to expand their vision of the contemporary Philippine Diaspora.
Featured artists: Eliza Barrios, Cece Carpio, Christopher de Leon, Arvin Flores, John YoYogi Fortes, James Gan Yan Garcia, Mik Gaspay, Mail Order Brides/MOB, Marcius Noceda, and Maria Vilotte.
The Villa residency supports the 2011 Filipino American Heritage Month calendar of events on the UH Hilo campus. His visit and related activities are made possible with support from the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation Laila Twigg-Smith Art Fund, the Howard and Yoneko Droste bequest, Student Activities Council (SAC); the Art Department, MAAPS, and the Chancellor’s Diversity Committee at UH Hilo.