CARLOS VILLA
Carlos Villa was a San Francisco-born visual artist, grass-roots activist, curator, author, and 40+ year educator at the San Francisco Art Institute, among other Bay Area institutions. His artistic origin story is often attributed to a single moment during his early education, when a professor told Villa, ‘Filipino art history does not exist.’
A decade later, Villa abandoned a career in minimalism to begin his ground-breaking practice of culling materials from indigenous cultures across the globe. He collided feathers, bone, physical body prints, and sperm to create strangely-human works that challenged colonial perspectives and laid radical claim to a cross-cultural, diasporic identity. It was Villa’s chess move to render Filipino art history visible and incarnate a foundation for artists to come.
Representative Artworks
Courtesy Silverlens, New York. Photo: Robert Divers Herrick.
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