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Patrick D.

Flores (born 1969, Philippines)


Art Critic, curator, Patrick D. Flores received his M.A. Art History and, later, his
Ph.D. in Philippine Studies from the University of the Philippines.
He is a member if the International Association for Aesthetics and an Associate
member of the National Research Council of the Philippines.
He has received prestigious fellowships from the Folklore Fellows Summer
School in 1997, the Starr Foundation Visiting Senior Research Fellowship from
the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art in
Washington and the Asian Public Intellectuals Fellowship from the Nippon
Foundation for 2004-05.
His book, Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art was published in
1999.
His essay, Birthing Women Artists, traces the triumphs and struggles of
Philippine women artists in the twentieth century.

Birthing Women Artists


By PATRICK FLORES

The theme of birthing sustains much of the metaphor with which women artists
have conceived the world and, in this season of centennials, the nation.
The problem of rendering the gender as a vital discourse in the transformative
practice of art has been dealt with in many ways. But the most significant gains come
from that history. This undertaking has made us believe that women are subjects and not
only objects of study or bearers of the male look; at the end of the day, women through
their art take on meaning as women artists in culture and society.
The power to assert identity is the heart of such search, and the field of art has proven to
be a rich vineyard from which a harvest of ordeals can be reaped
Sweeping changes
The first woman artist to gain auspice in Philippine art history was Pelagia
Mendoza y Gotianquin (1867-1939) who was the first woman student of the Academia de
Dibujo y Pintura, the only coeducational institution in Spanish Philippines. Under the
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mentorship of Agustin Saez and Lorenzo Rocha, she won an award in sculpture for a bust
of Columbus during the celebration of the quattrocentenial of the discovery of
America.
Another artist, Carmen Zaragoza y Rojas (1867- 1943), excelled in painting. She
continued on the trail blazed by her uncles, the architect Felix Rojas and the landscapist
Felipe. Her work Dos Inteligencias won a prize at the 1892 Columbus celebrations and in
1895 she was awarded a copper medal for her two landscape works at the Exposicion
Regional de Filipinas. Many Filipino women painters participated in that exposition.
According to art historian Regalado Trota Jose, they were Concha and Adele Paterno
(Paz Paternos step-sisters), Conception de Montilla, Patricia Reyes, Ana Garcia Plana,
Josefa Majo, Concepcion Ortiz, Olimpia Teran de Abella, Rafaela Calanta, and Fermina
David.
The third important name is Paz Paterno. Not much is known about the artist
except that she descended from a family of art patrons from Quiapo and that she came
under the tutelage of Lorenzo Gurrero, Feliz Martinez and Teodoro Buenaventura; her
teachers were highly regarded for their exemplary work in portraiture, still life and
landscape.
The eminent art critic Alice Coseteng describes Paternos celebrated work, Still Life,
sumptuously: The massive fruit cluster is anchored high up against the large tree on the
right foreground. From there the fruits cascade downward plentifully to the ground,
forming a half arc; tightly packed at the upper section and at the center, finally spilling
out some lanzones and the balimbing on the ground at the tip of the cluster. What a
variety of fruits on display for the eyes to feast on: lanzones, bananas, mabolo, atis,
balimbing, pili, coconuts.
Paterno died at age 47. Coseteng pays loving tribute to her courage: This
concededly frail woman, by submitting herself to the rigorous discipline of her art, was
able to break through the barriers of convention and to make herself felt in the maledominated world of art.
As modernism began to hold sway in the Philippines after the Pacific War, Anita
Magsaysay-Ho was in the forefront of sweeping changes in the art scene. She was a
respected member of that brotherhood of Masters called the Thirteen Moderns, with the

pioneering modernist Victor Edades at the helm. Later as a legacy of that modern spirit,
the first woman abstractionist Nena Saguil, who moved to Paris, stunned the art world
with her distinct cosmology of dots and veins.
Flourishing careers
More women came to the fore sooner than expected.
Lyd Arguilla, the gracious painter and owner of the Philippine Art Gallery, would
channel the bustling the energy of Philippine modernism into flourishing careers. Purita
Kalaw Ledesma of the Art Association of the Philippines would continue to carry
Arguillas torch. Finally, former First Lady Imelda Romualdez Marcos would consolidate
culture and the arts as a sector and endow it with both capital and infrastructure.
The reign of the queens, however, came to an end. But even before the eras
waning, a new cycle of artistic lives was already waxing. Print makers and graphic artists
Brenda Fajardo, Ofelia Gelvezon-Tequi, and Imelda Cajipe-Endaya started to reconfigure
new imagery of identity and struggle in the 1970s and 1980s. Even now they continue to
explore new frontiers of art making, venturing into the darker continents of assemblage,
mythology and political tableaux.
Inspired by this resurgence of the woman spirit, brave souls bolted the prison of
academia and forayed into the realm of installation, conceptual art and non-traditional
sculpture. Agnes Arellano, Julie Lluch, Genara Banzon and Francesca Enriquez have
proven the woman question can be best addressed in forms that they defy the deadweight
of the belletristic tradition. Painting had to give way to two-dimensional expressions and
sculpture was supplanted with multidimensional structures.
Still, to pursue the feminist agenda, women artists in the 1990s formed
collectives. The biggest of these is KASIBULAN (Kababaihan sa Sining at Bagong Sibol
na Kamalayan) which mounted two significant exhibits in its early years. The first
featured a collaboration between metropolitan artists and nameless weavers in the
Cordillera and sought to shatter the primacy of fine art or indigenous art. The other,
Filipina Migranteng Manggagawa (Filipino Women Migrant Worker), pushed women
artists into the arena of advocacy and exacted from them the commitment to analyze the
current diaspora of Philippine women labor across the global ethnoscape . The Australian

critic and curator Julie Ewington wrote then that in the international context,
KASIBULAN is remarkable for the isolation of its organized feminist intervention in
Southeast Asia cultural politics [I]ts projects exemplify one of the most vital of the
Philippines currents for cultural change in this sorely embattled society.
Images of intervention
Women in the Philippine art history have a narrative to tell and a heritage to
share. We are not simply talking of careers but also the politics of representation, both as
women in art and art by women.
Three fronts delineate the sites of struggle and inquiry: iconography, practice and
criticism.
Women artists must tap deep into history and the radical traditions it has inspired
in search of signs and symbols that will give justice to the complexity of womens
struggle. This they can do either by refunctioning such icons as the nude, the Mother and
Child, Inangbayan (Mother Philippines) into more dynamic images of intervention in the
social process, or by weaving pre-figurative scenes that herald an order no longer
ordained by patriarchal mandates. Women artists must aspire to think of new
iconographies to represent the struggle in multiple forms and think about their lives
beyond ethnic trinkets, free spirits, goddesses and stereotypical portraits of poverty.
Second, women ought to revaluate the modes of producing and disseminating
their art. Now is the best time to break through the walls of the museum and the market,
and once and for all relocate within the more promising womb of cooperatives, cultural
organizations and grass roots collectives. As women artists, their commitment must see
through the problems imposed by the trade of art and develop the conviction to change
the world by changing the art world.
Finally, women artists must learn to talk about their art in relation to critical issues; they
must become art critics, art historians and curators. Their being artists should not confine
them to the traditional roles assigned to artists; rather, they must find new ways of doing
and making art, and articulating its political message across diverse constituencies in
academe, government, the private sector and media. They must also link up with non fine
arts artists like papier-mch molders, pastilles (candy)- wrapper designers , muralist,

cartoonist, furniture workers, doll decorators and photographers.


Fringes of memory
Pioneering printmaker Ofelia Gelvezon-Tequis image of a widow standing
beside her husbands casket is a picture within a picture- a photograph rendered on
canvas. How this picture is taken, seized from a moment of pose in an hour of
bereavement, signals a shift of site from film to portrait. The casket is draped in the
nations flag, a mirror-image of which hovers above the woman as if to hold vigil and
keep the peace: the husband , one gleans from family mementos, is a military man whose
medals of conquest are tarnished by the sepia of recollection . A wash in blue and
seemingly floating in dead air, Tequis captured event partakes of tableau and studio
choreography. Stilted and staid, it nevertheless subtly glows with poignancy. After all, art
is posthumous and prefigurative, the womans grief and half-smile aspiring to gain represence in minds time and in posteritys space. As the widow looks into the eye of the
camera and is caught by the artists imagination, we wonder what could have been left
suspended in these fleeting instant of stillness and what had been lost in the process of
projection. That pictures conceal pain? That art might redeem death? That living means
having to leave traces? Flickering and in flux, scenes like this in Tequis untitled series of
acrylic-on-paper works at the Luz Gallery in September 1995 and her previous lively
juxtapositions of contemporary realities (Filipino women, former President Corazon
Aquino and her husbands assassins, coup plotters) against intimation s of an Apocalypse
engineered by pinball machines, flaking Renaissance fresco pigments and Italian painting
iconography- all flash in the fringes of memory.
Illumined by shafts and auras of gold and suffused with folk imagery, Brenda
Fajardos Labaw Donggon Series in mixed media brings us to the ancient world of the
people of Sulod in Panay, to the epic of their history. In Gibalik ni Anggoy Ginbitinan
kag anngoy Doronoon an Kaisog ni Labaw Donggon, two women clad in patadyong
(long skirt) strike a man with bolts of lightning emanating from their magical hands. The
lore written on cogon (grass) paper tells of courage changing custody amid the sea, the
trees, the golden sun, the earth. What power these women have as they ordain the
landscape; what energies they charge when they bring forth the worlds dominant, residual

and emergent. For the epic recalls the archetype of a warrior seized by pride and prowess
and caught up in a struggle with nature, here embodied by his wives and its physical, soul
and spiritual dimensions. On the surface on the earth and into the light, Fajardo fleshes
the world of Labaw Donggon in the highly imaginative and insightful motifs, tableaux,
and narratives of mythical consciousness still to be cast in the mold of ideological
engagement.
Parisienne Nena Saguil, one of the last of the revered Filipino modern artistexpatriates, weaves a cosmos of cosmos of forms ion pen and ink. At first looking like
cross-section explorations of plant parts or unicellular organisms under the scrutiny of a
microscope, the images later transform into the organs of the elements, the fiber of the
universe: dots, bubbles vortices, rays all delicately drawn to create the vital system of
order, of nature congealing in imaginative schemes, in the shape of ecology. Although
Saguil, who died in 1994, worked in the abstract mode, her other works tell us that she
had other concerns as well. Two 1950 works show the artists range of figurative
repertoire as she portrays an enlarged hymen and a woman cleaning a toilet bowl
splattered with human waste. These two paintings sustain the vitality of Saguils oeuvre,
which was the focus of renewed attention in September 1995 at the Lopez Memorial
Museum and will be subjected for further scrutiny at a major exhibit at the Cultural
Center of the Philippines in 1997. Saguils world, indeed, is all her own and ours as well.
As if to build a home in a strange land and to keep house for strangers, the
Filipina Domestic helper wife, mother, daughter- labors in the spirit of violent toil.
Imelda Cajipe-Endayas installation Filipina DH at the National Commission for Culture
and the Arts Galleries usher us into fragmented scenes of her solitude and her mangled,
dispersed body: To create the installation, I have recycled old curtains and bed covers
(objects of my own sewing and mending) and arranged them with other household
implements. Mostly rags petrified into black roughly textured domestic artifacts, I
interspersed them with mementos of familial and religious devotion. A craggy sack-cloth
pillow on tiles laid out as a cold bed, an iron board adorned with Mater Dolorosas ray, a
flat-iron hanging over worn-out slippers, an empty dish on a microwave oven, a hand
reaching out, prickly mittens clipped with sentimental cassette tapes, a native mat, a
fatigue suitcase, a faded flag, an arm cleaning a high rise window, a grass broom, a

vacuum cleaner, images of the Virgin Mary, maids uniforms, a rope, a chain, a knife.
As we are about to succumb to the sight of emotional ravage, an isolation box
confronts us point blank. Small and obviously airtight when closed, we find here a metal
chain, a flashlight, and the absent object of incarceration. We suddenly realize that this
thing is suspended, hanged like the criminal it must contain.
This unrelieved misery in a stark black and white is broken only by the pastel
colors of the uniforms, an inscription of identification and regulation, strung together as if
on a clothesline. Surreptitiously sneaking out of the pockets of these work clothes are
letters for home- remittances perhaps? whose mute witnessing to local-global
conversations (the traffic of people, the exchange of human capital) inevitably resonates
with the sad silence of luggage snaking across the cold vinyl floor at the sigh of the
solidarity among Filipinos huddled in the intersections and interstices of transnational
space. To complete my installation, viewers participate by writing out a good wish or
prayer and tying this as baggage tag to symbolize their advocacy of rights and welfare of
OCWs (Overseas Contract Workers), Cajipe-Endaya says.
Ofelia Gelvezon-Tequi, Brenda Fajardo, Nena Saguil and Imelda Cajipe-Endaya
offer images that seek to awaken the will of women to change the places, locations
grounds, borders and make different the lives and art they live. They uncover new roots
and itineraries, new cartographies to map out the roots not toward a room of their own,
but toward a network of worlds of other women and other comrades in struggle. Theywe-must divine a future that, because more humane and no longer ruled by patriarchal
monarchies, lasts forever.
Source:
Flores, Patrick. "Birthing Women Artists." Sulyap Kultura 1996: 8-13. National
Commission for Culture and the Arts. 30 May 2003. National Commission for Culture
and the Arts. 13 Sept. 2008

PRE DEPARTURE ACTIVITY:


Particular artists will be discussed in the essay. Preparation and background
information will be needed to appreciate the essay fully. Look into the works of
the following:
Pelagia Mendoza y Gotianguin
Paz Paterno
Anita Magsaysay-Ho
Nena Saguil
Brenda Fajardo
Ofelia Galvezon-Tegui
Imelda Cajipe-Endaya and
Kasibulan

GUIDING LIGHTS:
1. What must women artists do to assert their identity in an evolving history of art?
2. Who are the women artists that have broken vital ground in Philippine Art?
Choose one artist and explore her life and work at length.

CONNECTING FLIGHTS:
Go to an all-woman exhibit. Observe how women artists treat their subjects; what
are their preoccupations? How do they use their medium?

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