Towards a Herstory of Filipino Women’s Visual Arts

Imelda Cajipe Endaya

(A paper written for the National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) for the
Roundtable Conference on “Women in History and History of Women” on 27 June 2015. )

A rich resource of visual arts by Filipino women can be historically viewed within a Filipino feminist framework: 1) Her art results from a
struggle to empower and transform herself through her art-making; 2) Her art’s distinct visual idiom and symbols are grounded on woman’s
personal, social and historical contexts, thereby expressing a female collective consciousness; 3) Her art contributes a distinct, whether positive
or critical, point of view in creation and perception towards the development of women for a culture of peace, environmental harmony, justice,
and productivity of a nation; 4) Her art has either perfected a tradition or has originated symbols and expressions of women’s condition,
aspirations or transformation; 5) Her art-making reflects a position for the protection and propagation of crafts and other productive activities
that are traditional domain of women. This proposition is reformulated from the statement of goals of Kababaihan sa Sining at Bagong Sibol na
Kamalayan (KASIBULAN), the first Filipino feminist arts organization founded by contemporary women visual artists.

In 1987, after the EDSA People Power revolt, five women visual artists--- painters Brenda Fajardo, Anna Fer, and Imelda Cajipe Endaya,
culptor Julie Lluch, and craft maker Sister Ida Bugayong , who were part of the movement for national democracy, founded the KASIBULAN, an
acronym for the vernacular name which translates as Women in the Arts and an Emerging Consciousness . We lined up our goals, among which
are “ 1) to effect an understanding and collective consciousness of Filipino women from which stronger images and identity can emerge and
transformation can begin by giving a sense of power and empowerment rooted in the Babaylan tradition; 2) to project expressions of Filipino
women artists – their visual language, their sensibilities and artistic excellence – grounded on culture and history; 3) to recognize and empower
women as vital force that oppose destructiveness – nuclear power, war and globalization – seeking to create a peaceful and environmentally
harmonious world for their children; 4) to recreate symbolism, imagery, values and beliefs of women’s personal and collective transformation
5) to protect and develop crafts that are the traditional domain of women – indigenous and folk.” /1 These were KASIBULAN’s objectives as
envisioned and recorded in its organizational charter. With nearly three decades of fluctuating operation, its members today recognize the
importance of continuing its mission.

To buttress this framework, let me borrow basic definitions of feminist empowerment from feminist critics and historians. Flaudette May
Datuin states “Empowerment refers to the artists’ capacity to transcend and transform the limits and advantages of their social and artistic
environment as well as their contexts of production, thus prefiguring new images and identities, and alternative ways and spaces for making and
disseminating art.” Fe Mangahas speaks of the woman babaylan’s empowered status in society, and that this empowerment is inseparable from
the concern for the well-being of members of their community, their love for Mother Nature and their faith in Bathala or Supreme Being whose

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divine law rules people’s lives. Elizabeth Garber states that feminist consciousness means having an awareness of woman's economic , political
and social status in society, and that accomplishments by women are not necessarily feminist. Katy Deepwell insists “Women's art should be tied
up with the collective gaining of power by women.”

Creativity and excellence know no gender, yet contemporary artists cited here understand that the label ‘woman artist’ has the danger of
diminishing their status in the art-scene-at-large. They have also asked themselves whether consciously working on a feminist narrative, as in
any ideology, would lessen the artistic merits of their work. Even the Kasibulan founders feminists as they are, admit that initially they create
from the subconscious about their life experiences without knowing what feminism was. But in the process of disentangling personal struggles
with social analysis, diverse feminisms grew into artistic commitment. Let us consider how these artists, whether they choose to be called
‘feminist artist’, ‘woman artist’, or simply ‘artist’, have negotiated positive changes in their circumstances as women and developed distinctive
expressions in their art.

The contextual/thematic chart below encapsulates this framework. Artists and their art listed are approximately chronological by birth
and activity. Indigenous artists, while living in contemporary setting, represent anonymous native artists of their communities including their
forbears. Not self-conscious as artists, they have soulfully created functional art based on traditions of Austronesian cultures older than the
Islamic and Christian indoctrination that marginalized them. They have been recognized by the state for their excellence in keeping their
traditions alive. In Spanish colonial times, anonymous artists continued to be creative and productive through forms of sewing, embroidery,
applique, jewelry-making, dressing of religious icons, paper-cutting of pastillas wrappers, weaving, leaf art and food art. With the changing
environment and globalization of culture, these craft by artisans have been diminishing. The introduction of western forms such as painting,
sculpture, and printmaking brought the consciousness of individual attribution and copyright ownership indicated by the artist signing her work.
Although the establishment of fine arts schools initially excluded women, it spurred the development of fine arts even among upper class women.
Women and their work have been largely invisible in history, due to the given reproductive and supportive roles that cause women to give up
their individual careers. For obvious reasons, gaps on data about indigenous and colonial women’s art are wide, thus the chart is uneven.

From colonial to modern and contemporary time, individual artistic development progressed from classical mimesis to individual
innovation. Women artists are many and the list of outstanding ones continue to grow. But due to limits of time and space for this occasion, few
are selected here for varying reasons: pioneering status or daring spirit, strong sense of history, peculiarity in outlook, unique approach to
medium and materials, originality and excellence in craft. All have received recognition and awards for their accomplishments in art. The artists
who are also mothers have lived well their motherhood roles side by side with art-making. Majority have performed their wifely roles in varying
degrees of success and failures. The chart summarizes how these women have modified and expanded their roles in the process of empowering
themselves and inspire others through their art-making. Intended to expand into a more comprehensive inventory, this chart is meant to be just a
beginning.

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 National Living Treasure and dream-weaver Lang Dulay of Lake Sebu, Cotabato. Photography by Rocel Zamora-Dantoc

Women Artists in Indigenous Society

In traditional society, crafts are made for daily use as well as rituals that are passed on for generations. They play significant functions in
the life cycles of birth, courtship, marriage, death, worship, appeasement of nature’s forces, supplication in planting, gratitude in harvest, and
victory in war. Indigenous peoples continue to perform these traditions and functions, protecting our flora and fauna and keeping our cultural
heritage alive; they are most vulnerable to the impact of industrial and technological development and the onslaught of environmental
degradation.

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 Lang Dulay (ca1928-2015). Women artists in indigenous society play the combined venerable roles of babaylan (priestess-healer) and
panday (crafts community leader). Like the babaylan, Lang Dulay, the T’boli weaver of t’nalak, had inherent extrasensory faculties. Living in an
environment of mountain and lake in South Cotabato, she was sensitive to nature’s forces. True to her tribe, she was aware of T’boli origin myth
built around creation from upsurge of water and earthly life emerging from the floods. In one of her documented testimonies, she revealed she
must first dream of a design before she could weave one. Like a panday , she first had to gather raw materials for her craft, stripping leaf-stems of
abaca to get fibers, and parts of bark, roots and leaves to get colors. Then she refines and evens out the fibers, dye, dry, and tie them in strands.
She then sets the strands for a tedious tie-dye process of weaving in a back-strap loom. Lang Dulay created over a hundred designs such as
entwined zigzags, triangles, diamonds, hexagons, and other linear patterns suggestive of crab, crocodile, butterfly, bird in flight, frog, shield,
person in shelter, flowers, clouds, mountain and water. They reflect day-to day life stories, struggles, and the spirit world of her people who live
intimately with the gifts and wraths of nature. Committed to sustaining the soul heritage of the Tboli, she shared her knowledge and artistic skills
to younger women in the community. In 1998, Lang Dulay received the Gawad Manlilikha ng Bayan (National Living Treasure).

Left: Haja Amina Appi at work. Image from Presidential Museum and Library. Right: Her tepo (mat). Image from takemetomindanaogroup5.

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 Haja Amina Appi (+2013). Mat-weaving is another female domain. And the finest work of banig or tepo (mats) comes from the hands of
Haja Amina Appi, Sama mat weaver of Unggus Matata, in Tandabas island, Tawi-Tawi. To be able to weave her mats, she first gathers wild thorny
pandan leaves from nearby swamps, strip the leaves, sun-dry, cook, dye them in different colors, then flatten and redry them until ready to be
woven. The main mat is lined with another layer of undyed plain grasses large enough to frame the main mat. She loves experimenting with
color dyes which she mixes herself. Colors are yellow, red, violet, green, orange, and blue. She confidently improvises weave combinations to
produce new patterns and color nuances. Amina’s originality lies in the way she transforms traditional Sulu designs into distinct
reinterpretations. One would easily feel the presence of the ukkil or naga forms in her precisely woven mats. The lateral crab shapes echo into a
stair-like continuum. Recurring boat shapes suggest the rhythms of the graceful pangalay dance. Curvilinear repetition reminisces the wild sea
waves of Sulu. All these manifest her remarkable sensitivity, strong sense of experiment and excellent conceptualization of design. Haja Amina
Appi has perfected tradition of mat-weaving which she inherited; likewise, she has passed on her techniques and designs to younger women in
her community. She was awarded the Gawad sa Manlilikha ng Bayan (National Living Treasure) in 2005.

Women Artists during the Spanish and American Colonial Periods

Paz S. Paterno (1867-1914) was born in Sta. Cruz, Manila to a prominent family where women were fine embroiderers, a sister was
another painter and a brother was a highly-lettered politician and author. Her milieu was a disjunctive period of prosperity for the business elite
as well as struggle for reform and revolution against Spain. At that time, skill in embroidery (with colored threads and one’s own long hair) was
measure for girls and women who would be housewives and matriarchs. The Academia de Dibujo y Pintura was not open to females, but Paz was
already painting bodegones or still-lifes. She was known to have been privately tutored in visual arts by Lorenzo Guerrero, Felix Martinez, and
Teodoro Buenaventura, the best known painters in Manila then. Classicism was the standard in painting and sculpture, and this meant being
skilled in copying physical nature and reality. Note that still-life painting in classical Europe was consigned by art historians to the lower
hierarchy of painting, judging that the genre did not need genius but only virtuoso skill; but when it became lucrative, male painters also engaged
in them. Paz was only seventeen when she painted the masterful Still Life (with butterfly) in 1884. She had the predilection to compliment her
still life with a background of a distant landscape, at times including a shadowy boat with rowers. This was vogue in Europe in the 1800s and Paz
may have gotten this idea from pictures brought by trade in the colonies. But no ordinary copyist, her originality lies in her proud choice of
depicting her native reality: lanzones, susong dalaga, balimbing (starfruit), langka (jackfruit), mabolo, and buko (young coconut). The painting
reflects the abundance of nature in her country, and the life of a class which was able to enjoy time for picnic and sightseeing. Her work is
admirable for their asymmetrically balanced composition, delicate but energetic brushwork on gradations of hue intensity and tonal values. She
captured the momentous freshness of newly picked or peeled fruit, mist of the sky, and motion of leaves at the background blown by the wind.
Her still lifes are distinctive as she animated them with a bird or a butterfly in flight. She was known to have painted “Fruits and Flowers”, “River
Scene with Banca”, “River Scene with Steamboat”, and “Still Life with Bird”, “Portrait of a Woman”, and “Orilla de Pasig” or a record seven oils-on-
canvases in two years, (Hernandez 2004). She participated with six artworks at the 1895 Exposicion Regional de Filipinas en Manila. These are

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indeed no ordinary accomplishments for a young female artist doing an occupation dominated by men, in an era when women were invisible
from the annals. Paz never married; even with domestic responsibilities she certainly had more time for her art.

Paz S. Paterno. Still Life, 1884. Image from Department of Education’s Portfolio of Sixty Philippine Art Masterpieces.

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 Pelagia Mendoza (1867-1939). Zaide informs us that Pelagia “…since early childhood manifested a remarkable talent for art. When she
was yet a little girl she loved to sketch beautiful landscapes, to embroider exquisite designs on handkerchiefs, and model clay figurines people,
animals, birds, and flowers.” She was the first female to get accepted to the Academia de Dibujo y Pintura. In 1892 she won first prize in
sculpture for a wax bust of Christopher Columbus at the art contest of Quadrocentennial of Columbus’ Discovery of America. Carmen R. Zaragoza
(1867- 1943) entered her ink drawing “Dos Inteligencias” in the same event, and won a price. She had two landscape paintings which won copper
medals at the Exposicion General de Filipinas in 1895. Careers of women artists were cut short due to female roles expected of them. For
example, Clemencia Ramirez Guerrero, a talented painter was a student of the famous Lorenzo Guerrero, but when she married her teacher, she
bore him nine children. For understandable reasons she had no time to develop her art career. This has been the prevailing circumstance of
women in the arts. The art scene during the Commonwealth period did not surface more female artists even at a time when women became
suffragists and became more visible in the civic realm. Women’s names however came up, being mentioned as first art teachers of male artists
who became famous like Fabian de la Rosa and Fernando Amorsolo. At the UP Jorge Vargas Museum I recently encountered a canvas each by
little known painters of the Commonwealth up to peacetime period: Pacita Roxas who did the finely rendered “Portrait of Luisa Vargas”, Carmen
Herrera and Erlinda Vargas who painted quiet landscapes in broad-strokes naturalist manner. So much is left to be researched on these wmen
artists if ever documents on them and their art pieces at all survive.

Women Artists in the Postwar and Modern Period

Both Anita Magsaysay-Ho (1914-2012) and Nena Saguil, born on the same year, emerged from the conservative influence of Fernando
Amorsolo, their teacher at the UP School of Fine Arts and canon of Philippine painting then. Magsaysay-Ho moved to study in New York before
she could graduate in UP. While living as an expatriate matron of a wealthy family, she was privileged to be constantly visible in the Philippine art
scene. Saguil migrated to Europe at a mature age of 40 and for over a decade became a recluse, unable to connect or visit her country of birth.

Magsaysay-Ho was lone female artist among the historic Thirteen Moderns of Philippine art. She painted serene women garbed in baro’t
saya doing their daily tasks in settings where men are absent. Her images of women have been criticized as faceless and without individu
characterization. They are busy harvesting, bundling grain stalks, winnowing palay, picking fruit and flowers, selling the day’s catch at a fish
market, collecting seashells, weaving baskets, rolling up mats, and picking up chickens into their coop. The upside of this, consciously or not, is
that her grouping of women suggest sisterhood and cooperation where women work together without competition The artist-wife of Robert
Ho, a Chinese shipping magnate, consistently painted and exhibited in galleries and museums. She revealed that she did so only when her
husband left for the office and packed up clean before he returned. The husband never saw her paint; was surprised at how she could hold art
exhibits. Though affluent, she lived the life of a displaced citizen of the world. Her early works on women workers were executed in raw, heavy
strokes, quite down-to-earth that one could almost smell sweat and soil. Influence of cubism is apparent in the way she shaped female figures
from quasi-triangles and planes with gestural strokes of contrasting brown tones. Rustic women as subject never left her. She anchored her

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lifetime career on them as though to stabilize her inner self and cultural identity. Towards the next decade, her sense of space expanded so that
only two, three or a few figures would block a broad surface, using more refined and graceful strokes. In the seventies, she developed a phase
influenced by traditional Chinese landscape painting. Refined barefoot women inhabit scenic ocean ridges, stormy shores, or lush mangroves
rendered in quasi-ink washes and splashes. With a career spanning nearly three quarters of a century of consummate painting practice and
success in the art market, Magsaysay-Ho’s images of the Filipina devolved from the calm, well-built bodies who valued their own labors, to
soporific women unmindful of being gazed at, to effete portraits of delicate muses choreographed as perfumed peasants.

Anita Magsaysay-Ho, Sheaves, 1957. Oil on Board. 42.5 x 42.5 cm. , Ateneo University Art Gallery.

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 Nena Saguil (1914-1994), best known for her quasi-abstract paintings based on the circle, actually underwent a long process of
developing her painting style. After graduating from the UP School of fine Arts in 1933, her work evolved from figurative naturalism,
impressionistic still lifes and landscapes, satirical portraits, surrealistic and cubistic compositions of Philippine scenes. Saguil held her first solo
show of such works in 1950 at the newly inaugurated Philippine Art Gallery (P.A.G.) founded by painter-journalist-diplomat Lyd Arguilla. There
she volunteered her hours, and associated with modernist painters Vicente Manansala, HR Ocampo, Arturo Luz, Romeo Tabuena, Fernando
Zobel, and Magsaysay-Ho. In 1954 she received a scholarship to study in Spain where she pursued abstract painting. In 1956 Saguil moved to
Paris to further her studies at the Ecole des Artes Americane. In 1957 Saguil held her first solo exhibition at the Galerie Raymond Creuze in Paris,
where she exhibited non-objective compositions with linear and geometric elements. Saguil who was used to a comfortable life in the Philippines,
chose to became a recluse, isolating herself from family and the Philippine art scene. Living in a squalid apartment at the Saint Germain des Pres
district, she took housekeeping jobs in order to support herself. At times she painted and sold some canvases in an expressive figurative style in
vogue just so she could survive. Doing away with her past romantic notion of artist, she learned to present her works to galleries in business-like
manner. An adventurer in art media, she experimented with painting using a syringe to create her dots and circles. Another time, she rubbed
ground coffee particles onto her work to create texture. She made several shaped canvases with circular holes and relief elements. In 1968 she
returned to her country for the first time to exhibit at the Solidaridad Galleries. There she presented her landmark abstract style built on circles.
Ambiguously cellular, dots and circles reminisce biological tissues and net of nerves. On the other end, these can also be seen as cosmological
spheres, orbs, ecliptics and terrestrial mandalas. A deep sense of spirituality can thus be gleaned in Saguil’s work, as though stating that human
existence and the universe are mutually encompassing.

Rosario ‘Charito’ Bitanga (b. 1934) is painter, sculptor, teacher, academic dean, and organizational leader. At twenty-six, she earned her
MFA at the Cranbrook Academy in the USA, where her mentors encouraged her to forget her culturally-bound works and pursue a free, universal
style. In 1959 she won a prize for her “Galloping Horses” which was actually started as a representational work, detouring into a composition
that did not show the horses but only their motion. Her keen interest in exploring the idea of motion led her to study the Futuristic Movement
that originated in Italy during the early 1900s, although she rejected its basic association with violence, technology and industrialization. Rather,
what appealed to her was Futurism’s idea of total dynamism being captured directly in painting. “Coda” (1961) is like her first birthing; it was
also the first documented public exhibition of an abstract painting by a female artist in Manila. The composition conjures a vision of energy and
motion spurred by nature. Art critic Alice M.L. Coseteng praised it as “bold and daring. The total image seems to be cold petrified flames
spreading out from deep center.” Although an abstractionist, she would start with ideas of shapes, form, rhythm motion, and progressions culled
from nature. Forms in Bitanga’s reality are not separate from one another but interwoven with their surroundings. Bitanga’s trove of themes
include: ascending, descending, expanding, splashing, growing, centrifugal, centripetal, gliding, slipping, alternating and so on. With such subjects,
it is remarkable how she has kept her brush work disciplined, clean, and with certainty of linear grace. Bitanga’s development was not without

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struggle and interruption. The highly educated and skilled Bitanga moved her art career to the backseat when she became wife of scholar and
anthropologist Jesus Peralta and a mother of three. In their small apartment, she could only work at night after she finished homely tasks and
tucked three sons to bed. The threat of asthma in the family also limited her work due to the hazard of breathing fumes from paint and solvent.
Today, as painter, sculptor, retired teacher, dean, and organizational leader, Bitanga enjoys her creative mobility in life, painting and sculpture, so
very aptly symbolized by her abstract paintings.

Left: Nena Saguil, Blue Cosmos, 1967. Image from Galleria Duemila.

Right: Rosario ‘Charito’ Bitanga, Coda, 1961, oil on canvas, 60” x 40”. Image from Cid Reyes.

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Classic Women Artists in Contemporary Time

Hermogena “Nene” B. Lungay, Ode in Pink for Gardy, 2010-11, oil on canvas. Courtesy Liongoren Gallery

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 Hermogena “Nene” Borja Lungay (b. 1929) had always been in the shadows of her celebrity classmate Jose Joya, and province mate
Napoleon Abueva, who both became National Artists. It is understandable how easily she got lost in the routine tasks of wife, mother of nine and
co-provider. Cautious about the romantic epithet “starving artist,” she had no qualms about painting decorative flowers and fruit or rendering
them on fans and accessories as clients would like them. She made sure she balanced livelihood with her commitment to art. Her biographer
Marjorie Evasco quotes her : “Do not forget how to paint your flowers and fruits. These will help you survive in the world. But take care to paint
each one very well.” Lungay struggled to put up her art practice in a place where there was little or no appreciation for it. As artist and teacher
she helped changed all that. Lungay’s life, work and art are strongly rooted in her home-island of Bohol, not only as pride of place but as
nourishment for her creativity. One of her recent works is “Ode in Pink for Gardy”, synthesizes her affection, nostalgia, pride, and concern for the
island of her birth and its people. With gentle, finest brushstrokes, using hues muted in tonal values, she created an idealized composition of its
environment, its origin myth associated with a muse garbed in Philippine flag colors, indigenous peoples splashing along the waters and playing
music, sea-faring men, basket-weaving women, a children’s choir, the Chocolate Hills and mangroves calling for sustenance. This singular canvas
epitomizes Lungay’s lifework as a significant contribution to the arts and culture of Bohol.

Lydia Rivera Ingle (b.1934) is painter, pianist, novelist, biographer of national artist Victorio Edades, and advocate of environmental and
cultural heritage. She has been actively involved in forest preservation in her hometown, Davao. She studied painting and drawing in Madrid and
Paris in 1954, worked on a foreign service career in London, married and raised a family with three children there. In 1975 she returned to Davao
to live there with her three children. Critic Alice Guillermo cites the “sensitive particularity” of the women in Ingle’s her art as a “penetrating
insight into the small continually shifting gestures and postures of a relational body language...” Her untitled work is an innocent picture of a
paradisiacal forest. There animated figures of men, women, children, and ambiguous four-footed fauna come together to bathe, play and enjoy the
refreshing waters of a rocky forest stream. Rendered in gentle linearity, elements appear like they weightlessly float and intersperse. The setting
of stones, waters, bushes and the trees become rich delicate texture that interweaves foreground with background. The total mood is one of
childlike bliss and a refreshing delight. The second canvas is entitled “Gossip.” One may easily dismiss the work for its title as it insinuates
discouraging productivity. But knowing Ingle’s life with multiple responsibilities, the picture can be seen as a reflection of a woman’s need for
relaxation and friendship, as respite from burden and isolation. While it is common to see pictures of men in camaraderie over liquor, this
women’s table is set and surrounded with refreshing flowers.

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 Two of Lydia Ingle’s oil paintings on canvas at left: untitled, undated. At right: “Gossip”.
Images from Ana P. Labrador ,” Beyond the Fringe”, Asian Women Artists, Art Asia Pacific, Australia 1996

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Contemporary Women Artists

Ofelia Gelvezon Tequi (b.1942) is painter, printmaker, and teacher. After earning a degree in literature, she earned a diploma in painting
in Rome and a scholarship in printmaking in New York. She has since then cultivated an unparalleled mastery of etching and engraving on
copper. Early on, Gelvezon had a predilection to use images from medieval European illuminated manuscripts, the Book of Apocalypse, and other
renaissance paintings. She re-contextualizes them into contemporary situations and social criticism, associating them with chance symbols such
as pinball, racing, and target games. Her early etchings were made from shaped plates and arches which she inscribed with text and textured
with aquatint. Later these evolved into predella and altar pieces and the more familiar colonial retablo. Her method of designing along this format
of niches has influenced a generation of younger artists, both male and female, in graphics, painting and sculpture. After a teaching stint at the
state university and winning awards in Philippine Association of Printmakers (PAP) competitions, she married Marc Tequi, a Frenchman who
loved the study of Philippine culture. They lived in Paris, raising a family with three children, matter-of-factly performing her tasks as housewife
while pursuing her artistic passion. She faithfully kept up with graphic skills in a community printmaking workshop. She became especially
proficient in viscosity printing where colors and ink lines are rendered in various depths, pressures and layers of brayer application. She never
lost sight of political events in her home country. During the years of anti-dictatorship movement, she integrated scenes of student protest, police
brutality, corruption and violence into her metaphorical narratives. An example is her series “Homage to Ambrogio Lorenzetti” (1985), wherein
she appropriated the Renaissance artist’s frescoes on the Allegory of Good and Bad Government. Its central figures are a dual Filipina touching the
two discs of the scale of justice being held over her head by an archangel, while a smaller Inang Bayan below her pulls the strings of the scale. In
her later paintings, she has continued to be inspired by Biblical stories, Stations of the Cross, and Mysteries of the Holy Rosary, interfacing them
with current scenes of labourer oppression, travails of Filipino overseas workers, poverty of masses amidst corruption. Her current works have
acquired more optimism, hope and celebration.

Brenda V. Fajardo (b.1940), painter, printmaker, and theatre artist, sees herself primarily as an art educator. Fajardo’s decision not to
marry when she almost did, enabled her to focus on her teaching and advanced studies. Thus she practically raised a bigger family of artists and
cultural workers whom she has trained, taught and guided. Even then, her role as nurturer remained with her as she cared for her elderly parents
in their end years. She has been instrumental to the founding, structuring and advising a number of art, education, and culture organizations. In
her Visayan hometown, she initiated Hanao-Hanao, a farming community engaged in revitalizing the arts of patadiong weaving, pottery, basketry,
music, and theatre. Decolonization is her guiding mantra for her cultural work as well as artistic creation. In her art she uses the very images of
colonizing such as European mysticism and religious symbols found in the Apocalypse and tarot cards to reclaim the innate strengths of the
native. Her art is indirectly autobiographical, playing with text and iconography of Philippine history such as in the series “Baraha ng Buhay
Pilipino.” It is an open-ended narrative of a colonial past built on a cast of cards of fortune, the world, a tower, a hanged man, a prince of the
church, a magician, a babyalan, and a fool. Fajardo reveals that her favourite card is Ang Gaga (the Fool). “I simply took the emblem of the fool
and turned it into a woman. It does not represent a negative view. Look at her: she is at the edge of a cliff and has a flower representing her

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idealism. She is reaching towards the sun, the source of energy and light, but there is a beast pulling her down. I see myself as Ang Gaga, it is my
personal symbol. At the same time it has a gender component. It’s a comment on the fact that women can aspire towards and to some extent
control their destiny instead of just accepting the circumstances that pull them down.” Entwining her historical landscapes with current issues
such as women’s rights, labor export, human rights, corruption and impunity, she consistently asserts the need for political will to transform.
Myths, legends and epics have also appealed to her as subject of rediscovering identity, such as Labaw Dongon and origin myth of the Philippines
with the bird Manaul. She has appropriated diaries and letters as handwritten narratives surrounding the question of heroes past and present.
Her flatly drawn symbols and characters of Philippine history continue to inhabit the present Philippines, critical of people’s fatalistic attitude and
indifference, and inciting them to act and rectify the prevailing disorder of things.

Left: Ofelia Gelvezon Tequi, Homage to Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1985, etching and
aquatint viscosity print, Cultural Center of the Philippines.

Right: Brenda V. Fajardo. Masubo ang Kasaysayan ni Maria. 2005.

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 Anna Fer (b1941) is painter, researcher, writer, illustrator, graphic and stage designer, advocate for the protection of environment and
indigenous peoples. When asked how she came about being a social realist she says “I have to bear witness to the times. It is part of my reality
that is also very personal, spiritual, and mystical. It has to do with very deep experiences in life such as separation, bonds, mother and child
relationship, and a feeling for life which I sense in a very vegetal way.” Anna was deeply involved in the nationalist struggle against the injustices
battering the country during the Marcos regime. Her first-hand experiences and resolute political stand resulted in protest artworks such as “No
to Ballots! No to Bullets! Boycott the May 1984 Batasan Election “(1984), “Paano Maibalik ng Eleksyon ang Demokrasya kung ang Bayan ay Gapos
ng Diktadura? (1984). The oil painting “Favali at iba pang Biktima” (1987) was inspired by a gruesome incident in Palawan she witnessed where
an indigenous man was brutalized and killed at gunpoint. She has illustrated books with field drawings in collaboration with an anthropologist
and musicologist about the life and culture of Palawan highland peoples. Her artistic output were results of field work. She actually lived with the
tribes to deeply understand and experience their way of life. Being active in actual forestation activities in Davao has inspired her to do murals on
the theme of subjugation of the earth as parallel to the subjugation of woman. She has shown that the Diwata of the waters and of the earth, is
continually being violated, in the same way that women are victimized by violence and trafficking. To Anna, life and art are inextricable; she can
only paint and draw truths which she actually observes, lives, and experiences.

Left: Anna Fer, Favali at iba pang Biktima, 1987, Oil on Canvas, Ateneo Art Gallery Center and right: Julie Lluch, Life size terracotta series Filipina 1898

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 Imelda Cajipe Endaya, Pasyong Bayan, 1983, Oil on Canvas and sawali panels , 72” x 216”. Metropolitan Museum of Manila.

Imelda Cajipe Endaya (b.1949) is painter, printmaker, writer, book designer, curator and arts project organizer. Though feminist, she
insists her first concern as an artist is to continuously explore new forms, materials, and ways of seeing. To her, art making is a personal
meditation, a search, and labor as well. Yet, personal search must be synthesized with a collective consciousness of retrieving a people’s history
largely forgotten by the globalized world. As a young wife and mother, she squeezed time from home chores to take part- time jobs as archival
researcher and writer. This enriched her storehouse of historical images at a time when scholarship and publishing on Philippine culture from a
‘bottom view’ was just awakening. Engrossed with the question of indigenous roots and cultural identity, she completed in 1976-79, a series of
prints which combined etching, serigraphy, collagraphy and photo-engraving using images of Philippine ancestors from colonial sources. Her
compositions are restrained commentaries on the ironies of racial subjugation and empowerment. In 1981 she completed a series of oil paintings
where wives and mothers peer from behind windows to witness the phenomenon of labor export, technology displacing native culture and
agriculture. Soon, having to scrimp on art materials, she used actual materials and objects from home. For her mixed media assemblages and
installations, she recycled sawali and nipa from her bahay kubo, her husband’s denim jackets, her grandmothers’ shawl, her mother’s crochet, her
beaded slippers, childhood clothes, and papier mache dolls from Paete of her childhood. Her themes include human rights, poverty, mail-order
bride, women as labor export, justice for World War II comfort women, and children’s rights. “Pasyong Bayan” (A Nation’s Passion) (1983)
expresses the political anguish and rage of a people struggling against the injustices of martial law propped up by imperialism. Often she has

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shown victimization and their root causes. Her view of social realism is that it should include a personal experience, anecdote or point of view. It
should provoke in order to awaken the viewer into thinking up ways of contributing to positive change. For example, in her installation “Foreign
Domestic Worker” (1995), on the floor are texts of specific problems, and on the woman’s iron board are texts where solutions are spelled out. In
her later works, she focuses more on depicting images of affirmation, hope, and triumphs in empowerment.

Julie Lluch (b.1946) had long declared herself a feminist when her colleagues in Kasibulan were undecided whether they wanted to call
themselves such. She said, “Rage is feminist’s middle name…Time was when I fought endlessly with my husband, threw my slippers at the TV set
when sexist ads were shown, smashed precious artwork to pieces because it was sexist, and even challenged a Catholic bishop to debate on
women’s issues.” She refers to her clay practice as the most “sensuous and pleasurable” feminine medium. She passionately pursued this after
being discouraged by the man of the house, a renowned artist, from being a painter like him. In 1982 she bravely exhibited her painted terra
cotta series of erotic, thorny cacti and spiked hearts, which spurred a debate on what feminist art should be. Then she created witty
autobiographical tableaus such as “Philippine Gothic II” (1984), an angry macho husband with an exasperated wife; “Picasso y Yo” (1985), the
artist as a distressed houswife upset over burnt fish; “Piscean Deluge”(1990), a self-portrait desperately swimming over troubled waters, and
“House on Fire” (1991), a metaphor for an urgently broken state-of-the-hearth affairs. All these are landmarks of feminist turning point,
convincing viewers that the personal is indeed political. After separation solved their differences, a long self-searching process resulted in inner
peace from becoming a devout Christian. Focusing on the theme of art and faith, she grew anxious that her art would no longer provoke rage and
thus be uninteresting. For the centennial of the Philippine revolution, she completed “Filipina 1898”, a dramatic tableau of nine women heroes,
both nameless and acclaimed. Less of portraiture, the figures are theatrical feminine embodiment of emotions and attitudes: sorrow, dejection,
protectiveness, defiance, struggle, ecstasy, hope, resoluteness, and supplication. Since then, Julie has moved on to a more productive career doing
commissioned work of portraits, heroes, and public monuments.

Agnes Arellano (b.1949), a highly-lettered woman in literature and the social sciences, has always been daring and free in life. In her
youth she trekked the path of a flower child and hippie. At thirty-one, she enrolled in fine arts at the UP to become a leading sculptor best known
for tableaus she calls “inscapes.” Beneath the surface of each art object is an underlying essence or integration of ideas. In her life-cast female
figures executed in synthetic marble, she brings together the sacred, mythical, and erotic, at times profane, drawn from her rich, peculiar personal
experiences. Her work tends to be surreal, often influenced by Buddhist and Hindu imagery and literature. A tragic fire that fatefully burned
down her ancestral home that claimed the lives of her parents and her closest sister-friend became a two-pronged turning point for her artistic
career. She established the Pinaglaban Gallery as a shrine and art initiative supporting avant garde art; in sculpture she became obsessed with
the creation-and-destruction paradox. In “Tatlong Buddhang Ina” (1996) she personifies the cycle of birthing, living, and dying in three goddess
figures. “Vesta”, cast from the face and figure of a friend, is a pregnant goddess acting out the mudra or gesture of generosity. She offers herself as
a vessel of life that nourishes with her own blood and breast milk. On her spine clings a reptile, symbol of an acute sense of vision and fierce
protection. “Dea” is a physical life-cast of self-liberation. Arellano reveals her four pairs of breasts signify the challenging encumbrance of her life

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as mother to three stepchildren and one biological child of her own. The artist as multi-breasted goddess sheds off her onerous old skin, even as
her arms which double as wings, are clipped behind her, and a serpent emerges from her pubis. The third figure is “Lola”, toothless and gaunt yet
fully wise in her inward vision. The artist says: “By casting real mothers, my aim is to bring the divine dimension back into the familiar human
figure - to stress the need to search for the sacred in everyday life.”

Agnes Arellano, Tatlong Buddhang Ina, 1996, Cold-cast marble, Metropolitan Museum of Manila.

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 Genara Banzon (b. 1953) was nurtured in the academic and forest life of UP Los Banos while studying her masters in development
communication side by side with practicing conceptual-environmental art inspired by her mentor Roberto Chabet. Her first solo exhibit in 1983
was a refreshing piece of conceptual art, far from the New-York Artforum Magazine influence prevailing within her circle of artists. It was an
installation built of works from paper she made by hand, dried flowers, leaves and butterfly wings gathered from her natural surroundings. It
was a conceptual universe she offered as a tribute to her father, an agricultural chemist and a National Scientist. After migrating to the USA, she
used woman’s body as thematic platform to weave personal anecdotes as a migrant, with social narratives of displacement in the Philippine
diaspora. Using her own methods of papermaking, she would layer them with photographic images from colonial history. A later example is
“Tinguian Woman” which she imbedded with seeds and fern leaves. She has developed techniques of etching photographs to include in her art
installations where issues of environment and woman’s health merge, such as in “Alagaan” (2000). In her other work, she fuses past and present
into a relevant juncture of postcolonial issues. An example is "Mahal Ba Kita: The Economics of Love," (1995) which focuses on ideas of respect,
dignity and justice. Here she crafted organic paper and combined them with ink and textiles, a palm cross, and a mirror. The figure is a silhouette
of herself formed from coffee and tea grounds and seeds. The box underneath is the same used for transporting the installation. She reflects on
the complex nature of Filipino identity rooted in diverse indigenous cultures, subjected to the interplay of colonial hangover and current geo-
politics. Living in a first world city, she deals with issues of economic inequality that have spurred many Filipinos to migrate to greener pastures.
Once she conceptualizes a work and creates a basic installation, she would extract certain elements and re-create newer, fresher installations.
Her art grows with audience rapport. She says: “I talk about art processes and art making, and I talk about community, education and
communication.” Audience perception of her work is important to her. She has created works as reaction to issues of mail order brides, as well as
Filipina maids working worldwide as nannies who have been unjustly treated, persecuted, or killed without fair and equal trial. She has often
pleaded for justice for all other migrants who ironically suffer separation from family for the sake of a better life for them. She realized working
on these issues help her strengthen her position as a Filipina amidst the political and economic conditions in her native country. Thus, even as an
expatriate for over three decades, Genara feels she never really left home.

Karen Ocampo Flores (b.1966) is painter, teacher, administrator, social activist, and advocate of artists’ rights. In her art, she
appropriates characters wearing Spanish period Filipino attire, inspired by the 19th-century master Damian Domingo. She sets them into
contemporary situations where a young woman emerges from dysfunction in a family, then awakens into her own predicament of embattled
man-and wife relationship, such as in “Father's House/Beautiful Moon/Mother's House”. In an earlier work “Dakilang Mangingibig” (1994), a
man pulls up his wife made helpless in ribbons like a marionette character being manipulated into action or inaction. Her paintings are
autobiographical revelations of her inner thoughts and dilemmas about woman’ body and psyche. She stated in 1999 “Now I know why I keep
avoiding the feminist question. It’s because I keep regarding the label as a trap, when the label is not the problem. We are forever defending our
position when the first task is to be comfortable and consequently to be effective in it.” Karen grew and matured in her painting style together
with the collective of exceptional young muralists called Salingpusa (Tag-along Toddlers) who created about Philippine cultural identity. It later
reorganized into Sanggawa (United Action), a group of politically enlightened activists who painted searing, satirical murals on national issues of

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Philippine history and governance. In 2005, she co-founded TutoK, an artists’ initiative which curates exhibits encouraging artists to take their
individual as well as organized stand on prevailing political issues.

Left: Genara Banzon, Mahal Ba Kita: The Economics of Love, 1995, installation.
Right: Karen Ocampo Flores, Father's House/Beautiful Moon/Mother's House, oil on canvas tryptich

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 Alma “Urduja” Quinto (b. 1961) sculpts with her scissors, pins, needle and threads, using foam and colorful textiles as her material.
Inspired by her studies in anthropology and researches on traditional cultures, she takes for her subject personages found in indigenous culture,
myth and lore. She translates whimsical line drawings derived from various indigenous textiles and pottery into embroidered and appliqued
tapestries, toys and shaped pillows. Engrossed with the subject of babaylan, the traditional priestess-healer, she has crafted them into dolls and
set them into multi-shaped mattresses, as in “Higaan ng Babaylan.” As though to take on the role of a modern day priestess-healer, Alma has
committed her own art making to a therapy practice to help rehabilitate young children survivors of sexual abuse. This has further enriched her
art, as she made sewing an act of collaborative play. With her ward, she shapes textiles and cushions into body parts. In “Lipad, Suso, Lipad,”
colorful winged breasts line up on the floor while others hang from the ceiling. Her soft sculptures become playthings and tent houses that give
comfort and hope to the marginalized communities she has worked with since 1993. Art-making as a means to mitigate pain, uplift depression,
comfort the afflicted and pick up pieces of broken dreams, is the essence of Alma’s vision of art. She realizes that her art that helps heal others
strengthens her own self-transformation. More recently, she organized ArtHoc, a group of cultural workers doing the House of Comfort Art
project. Together they sew tent-dwellings in various traumatized communities in including Leyte, Bulacan, Bohol, Cebu, and Maguindanao. Her
wards have become diverse and include survivors of abandonment, trafficking, disasters in the Visayas, and war in Mindanao. Women and
children participate in workshops stitching and embroidering their quilts of dreams. Alma says: “I encourage children to discover what is
innately good in them through the arts. They want to feel loved because they have been abused. The arts are non-confrontational. It is beautiful,
so it is more effective than academic learning. It makes children strong to confront their trauma and build their lives again.”

Josephine Turalba (b1965) is painter, sculptor, teacher, and academic administrator. Her peculiar art is motivated by the need for self-
healing from a personal tragedy where her father was shot dead with four bullets by a hoodlum gang lead by an ex-military man. To deal with
the trauma of being a prey, she picks up pieces of the very instruments of violence only to reverse them. Cropping off the picture of victimization
from her repository of images, she transforms would-be specimens of forensics into artifacts that embody the notion of protection. From gunshot
shells she crafted “Diwata’s Armour”, various sculptures like “Ballistigator” and “K9”, animal forms reminiscent of objects that accompany
mummified bodies into the next life. There is a tinge of decadence in the way she fashions bullet casings into flamboyant wearable, influenced by
her experience as jeweller, decorative designer. She incorporates video, performance and sound into her idiosyncratic visual vocabulary. Her
recent participatory installation “Scandals III” comprise 30 pairs of colourful high fashion sandals made from over 3000 bullet casings of calibre
.45. To purge herself further of all negative emotions that hound her, Josephine expands her personal theme of protection vis-a-vis the violent
race for control of wealth and power into the world panorama of cultural, economic and political hegemony. Moreover, she has learned to use her
art as a voice advocating an end to all such personal violence being committed the world over.

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 Alma Quinto, Lipad Suso, Lipad, (Fly, Breasts, Fly) installation of soft sculptures Josephine Turalba. General Mariana, 2011
Sculpture of metals , gold and bullet shells, 35 x 28 x 30 cm

Kiri Dalena (b 1975) was born to a couple of consummate artists, thus learning her skills in sculpture and painting early in life. After
finishing a college degree in Human Ecology, she studied filmmaking at the Mowelfund Film Institute. Her main involvement is documenting

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current social issues in film and video. She so sensitively does so with a journalist’s commitment to truth, a poet’s elegiac eye and a true artist’s
sense of eureka. The interactive venues of her output are film, television, art galleries and museums. In her installations, she combines video
with sculpture and found objects. In 2001 she co-founded the Southern Tagalog Exposure collective, a group of young artists and cultural
workers who documented human rights issues in the countryside. They exhibited in alternative sites, including one in the government-endowed
Sungdu-an project where their work was a critique of Philippine elections. They made an on-site installation of tampered ballots, yellow ballot
boxes violated and bloodied, and video footages of poor voters’ testimonies of cheating, vote buying and violence. More recently, Kiri convened
an organization of women human rights defenders. Her documentaries became more focused on finding justice for the numerous victims and
survivors of human rights violations, including the horrific Maguindanao massacre. Examples of her early video work are “Alingawngaw ng
Punglo” (Echo of Bullets) and “Red Saga”. Kiri Dalena is cinematographer for “Ka Oryang” (2011) and “ The Guerilla Is a Poet” (2013), full length
films she collaborated on with her sister film director Sari Dalena. In 2012 she created “Washed Out”, a video installation on scenes after
devastation by the storm Sendong, where in a Manila art gallery, she arranged drifted pieces of timber and logs from her home city, the ravaged
Iligan. Official count of the giant logs were four to five thousand giant timber stored in lay-down areas for use as basic wooden materials in
constructing shelter. But abandoned for an extended period, these posed more danger to the lives of survivors. Her emotions were conflicted
upon seeing little children finding joy in playing among the fallen logs. Her motive was to memorialize the casualties of privileged greed, and to
provoke urgency in helping assuage the trauma of survivors of the storm.

Aze Ong (b.1977) fashions sculptural installations by crocheting yarns onto metal, wood, fiber and with semi-precious stones. As a child
she loved to crochet and make art from scrap fabrics from her mother’s garment business. Working as a high school teacher in Kibangay,
Lantapan, Bukidnon, she was exposed to life among the Talaandig of Mount Kitanglad. She was impressed at how these tribes people lived their
art. Seeing them sew, embroider, pray over and wear their traditional clothes and head gears, perform traditional music and dances--- she vowed
to focus on her obsession with crochet and be a serious artist. Since then she has chained, and single-double-triple-treble-crocheted brightly
colored yarns into progressive cornucopia of discs, leaves, flowers, petals, sepals, vines, tentacles, and a colorful forest. Having no formulas,
numerical measures nor sketches, improvises spontaneously, passionately. Her centrepiece in “My Soul’s Light” ambiguously represents a giant
lily, a tree, a torch, or a chandelier. She says “I firmly believe art and life flow together. My art works are realization of experiences of
enlightenment.” She treats her art pieces like her own progeny having their own personalities, characteristics and feelings. She admits to having
difficulty connecting political, social or women’s issues with her art. But since her art stands for enlightenment, she believes her art with its
interactive experience helps heal the self and work out issues. Along with her installation and crochet sculptures, she mimes her daily chores,
dances her meditations and gestures nature’s processes of budding out, blooming, and closing in. ‘Liwanag ng Karanasan’ (Light of Experience) is
the title of her artwork that she continues to develop in segments where the theme of liwanag (Light) recurs. This work has grown to over twenty
feet long; it is her progressive diary accompanying her in her journey of life. It continues to expand and grow for as long as she is able to crochet
and perform her obsession.

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Kiri Dalena, Washed Out, 2012, video installation with driftwood debris from typhoon Sendong. Finale Art Gallery

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Aze Ong. My Soul’s Light, 2014, crochet installation at the Museo Pambata.

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 Women’s Past Forward

Thus we see how Filipina women artists negotiate and integrate their various roles as women and as culture bearers. Indigenous women
artist’s works are intrinsically built within functions of community. They value their own skills without the consciousness of being special, highly-
individualized persons. They are artists at the same time that they are farmers, food gatherers, co-providers and such other roles. Empowerment
is cooperative. as the husbands, sons and brothers like them, have to plant, harvest, strip, and burnish grasses and fibers so they can have
materials for their art. In the case of women artists during the colonial period, they had to cope with rigid social dictates on gender roles that
largely marginalized them and prevented them from directing their own personal paths in art and career. If they perfected crafts and art, they
were either anonymous or as auxiliary/ secondary status in the service of the male and homemaking. Since the modern period, woman’s destiny
has been regenerating through her own her own effort of making things bearable and more fulfilling to herself as a human being. Today our
enlightened daughters, including the artists listed here born after 1971, view our historical period now as post-feminist. Surely they are enjoying
their more equal and equanimous status as women, a legacy worked for by their feminist mothers.

Feminist Linda Nochlin in her 1971 seminal book by the same title asked “Why have there been no great women artists?”, said that in
order to understand why women have been underrepresented in art history, we needed to look “beyond the specific political and ideological
issues involved in the subjection of women." We need to look deeper into the basis of the question itself which is prejudging artistic careers not
within parameters of "greatness" in content or outlook, but as resulting dictates of long established institutional structures of market and history.
Only after these were understood can we see the real reason behind women artists’ invisibility. That is why we, the creative feminists of today
and the recent past four decades continue to exert this effort of institution-building for women, and framework-constructing for Filipino women’s
history.

Indeed Filipina visual artists and their art have changed the landscape of female consciousness as they share their struggles to empower
and transform themselves in beautiful, colourful ways. Through their life work creating distinct visual expressions and symbols, the nation’s
cultural life is richer and more inspiring. Though the women’s movement in the Philippines have made great strides, much is still left to be
desired in the mind-set and condition of women artists and women in general who slide back or are still oblivious to the cause of social and
gender justice. Visual arts by Filipina women should move from past forward as vital agents for the continued development of women and nation
for a culture of peace, environmental harmony, social justice, and productivity.

References:

Datuin, Flaudette May V (ed). Women Imaging Women Home Body Memory. Manila: Ford Foundation. 1999.

Datuin, Flaudette May V (ed). Home Body Memory/ Filipina Artists in the Visual Arts, 19th Century to the Present. University of the Philippines Press, 2002.

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Guillermo, Alice G. in Tiongson, Nicanor (ed). CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art. Manila: Culural Center of the Philippines. 1994.

Labrador, Ana P. “Beyond the Fringe”. Asian Women Artists. Australia: Art Asia Pacific. 1996.

Magno Icagasi, Rosa Maria. “The Filipina as Artist and as Art Subject in 19th Century Philippine Art”. Review of Women Studies. journalsupd.edu

Yuta Earthworks by Julie Lluch A Retrospective. Manila: Cultural Center of the Philippines, Galleria Duemila, and National Commission for Culture and the Arts,
2008.

Machida, Margo. (dis)Oriented: Shifting Identities of Asian Women in America. Exhibition Book. Henry Street Settlement Abrons Art Center/ Steinbaum Krauss
Gallery. 1995 .

Mangahas, Fe B., and Llaguno, Jenny (eds). Centennial Crossings Readings on Babaylan Feminism in the Philippines. Quezon City: C& E Publishing Inc. 2006.

Hernandez, Eloisa May P. Homebound: Women Visual Artists in Nineteenth Century Philippines. University of the Philippines Press. 2004.

Nochlin, Linda. Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists. 1971. (pdf version) in http://davidrifkind.org

Paterno, Maria Elena P., Alvina, Corazon S., Javellana S.J, Rene B., and Castro,Sandra B. Dreamweavers, Bookmark Inc, 2000.

Tanedo, Rochit I (ed). Who Owns Women’s Bodies?, Quezon City: Creative Collective Center, (art book catalogue for exhibitions held in 2001).

Tobias, Maricris Jan, “National Living Treasure Awardees” Lang Dulay and Haja Amina Appi, in www.NCCA.gov.ph , retrieved on June 8, 2015.

Torres, Emmanuel (1981). Kayamanan 77 Paintings from the Central Bank Collection. Central Bank of the Philippines.

Reyes, Cid, Living for Art/ R.Bitanga, Manila: Larawan Publishing, 2006.

Imelda Cajipe Endaya co-authored with Patrick Flores and was book designer of Nelfa Querubin A Passion for Clay, Galleria Duemila Metro Manila in 2014; wrote the
arts and culture essays and was book designer of Fe B. Mangahas, Kasaysayan ng Ating Bayan/ AngPilipinas Noon at Ngayon, Center for Community Transformation
(CCT) Group of Ministries Metro Manila in 2011; and was editor and book designer of Manuel_Rodriguez, Sr. into the Threshold, LRSL Foundation for the Arts, New York
in 2009.

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