Filipino American artist Maia Cruz Palileo is an interdisciplinary artist who couples family narratives of migration with an investigation into archival material. Their paintings, sculptures and installations blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, and recontextualise figures in history.
Read MoreMaia Cruz Palileo was born in 1979 in Chicago, USA, to parents who had emigrated from the Philippines. They received their BA in Studio Art at the Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, in 2001, and their MFA in Sculpture at Brooklyn College, New York, in 2008. In addition to their art practice, Palileo has previously worked as an educator at the LaGuardia Community College, Brooklyn College, and Parsons School of Design.
Much of Palileo's work draws from family narratives of migration and personal oral histories, coupled with the wider colonial relationship between the US and Philippines.
Palileo works across painting, sculpture, installation and drawing. Their work explores the dual conditions of migration and assimilation, combining personal anecdotes within a context of colonial histories and folk tradition.
The domesticity of migrant narratives is explored in earlier works such as Nochebuena (2013), which portrays a family seated in a living room coded with Filipino woven furniture and floor tiles. The painting—created as a record of the sudden death of their mother—is an attempt to reconstruct memory and ideas of home through the lens of Palileo's Midwestern upbringing.
Palileo's paintings typically feature lush, vibrant, abstracted landscapes and milieus that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction. They invite dreamlike interpretations while remaining firmly rooted in archive material and rigorous research. With their various native and colonialist lenses, the work of Filipino painter Damián Domingo, Filipino writer Isabelo de los Reyes' influential text El Folk-lore Filipino (1889), and the Dean C Worcester photographic archive are cited as pivotal source materials in the development of their practice.
Palileo drew on their investigations into these archives and bodies of knowledge to question and recontextualise her subjects outside the colonial gaze for their 2021 exhibition, Long Kwento, which utilises colour and expression to reinvigorate archival material in large-scale paintings and a selection of life-size wooden sculptures of figures.
The entanglement of archive, history and family was similarly referenced in Days Later, Down River (2023). In this body of work, Palileo reflects on the mythologies of two dormant volcanoes in the Philippines, Mount Makiling and Mount Banahaw, and draws connections to their family's relationship to this land and its talismans. Light and space is utilised to cast shadows of foliage onto ceramic sculptures of reclining diwata (fairies) and small busts around a central, historic loaned banig (woven mat), which are displayed among a series of paintings of figures in traditional Filipino clothing collaged onto colourful, impressionistic depictions of foliage.
Maia Cruz Palileo has held solo exhibitions at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (San Francisco); American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center (Washington, DC); Pioneer Works (New York); and Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space (New York). Group exhibitions include the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute (Washington, DC); Moderna Museet (Stockholm); and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha), among many others. Their work has been collected by institutions such as the San José Museum of Art (California); The National Museum (Oslo); and Library of Congress (Washington, DC).
Maia Cruz Palileo's website can be accessed here.
Arianna Mercado | Ocula | 2024
