Carlos Villa: Trans-Pacific imaginaries in Filipino American art

The San Francisco artist, educator, and cultural activist Carlos Villa (1936-2013) is one of the most significant U.S.-based visual artists of Filipino descent of the latter half of the twentieth century. Villa’s wide-ranging projects—spanning painting, sculpture, mixed media installations, and performance—are strongly underlined by the drive to manifest the presence of a Filipino American subjectivity in active dialog with twentieth-century Western modernist art. Recognizing that contemporary Filipino culture is fundamentally hybridized, having emerged from the mingling of many different cultural streams, including indigenous Pacific cultures and the centuries-old legacy of Spanish colonialism that brought in peoples and influences from around the world, Villa draws upon references from Polynesia, Australia, Asia, and Africa to craft his own syncretic vision of Filipino identification. This paper focuses primarily on the pivotal decade of the 1970s, when Villa began to introduce materials like cowrie shells, blood, bones, spit, hair, teeth, sperm, feathers, and mirror shards into his canvases—some of which took the striking form of Native Hawaiian-inspired feathered cloaks. For Villa these cape-like objects are manifestations of a visceral sense of connection to a far-flung Oceanic ancestry that he characterized as representing, “almost a surrogate father.” Villa’s foundational efforts will likewise be considered as a point of entry for younger generations of Filipino American artists who complexly engage in multi-sited explorations of identification with the Pacific region, including its indigenous cultures.