NEWARK, NJ — The Newark Museum of Art will present “Carlos Villa: Worlds In Collision” from Feb. 10 through May 8. Organized by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and the San Francisco Art Institute, the exhibition brings together 35 rarely seen works by Carlos Villa, a central figure in the San Francisco, Calif., art community and a leader in the multicultural activism of the 1960s and beyond. Villa’s unique, large-scale, mixed-media paintings and cloaks, which incorporate feathers and other unexpected materials on unstretched canvases, will be showcased, along with works in a stunning range of media that includes photography, body casts and body paintings.
A first-generation Filipino American, Villa was born and raised in San Francisco. After military service in Korea, he attended the San Francisco Art Institute at the height of the Beat era. Troubled by a teacher’s comment that “there is no Filipino art history,” Villa began to study non-Western art in a search for his cultural roots. Starting in the 1970s, Villa took a wholly independent approach to art making and created works with feathers, bones and tattoo iconography that reflected non-Western cultural alliances, and incorporated his own body through body prints and plaster casts. In the 1990s, he delved into the history of the Manong, the Filipino immigrant laborers of his parent’s generation — effectively creating the missing history he longed to see.
“Carlos Villa was a major artist who opened up a space within the contemporary art world for non-Western and immigrant narratives. His stunning cloaks and other formal experiments were ahead of their time, and we are thrilled to be able to share them, for the first time, with East Coast audiences,” said Linda C. Harrison, director and CEO of the Newark Museum of Art.
The Newark Museum of Art will also present a related installation in the Asian galleries, titled “Worlds In Collision: Selections from the Asian Pacific Collection.” Drawn from the museum’s distinguished collection of Oceanic ethnographic and Filipino art, the works on view are the type of ethnographic objects Villa referenced in his work, was known to have studied and could even have seen at the museum. Included are Kris daggers, a 19th-century Hawaiian cape and a carved memorial board from Papua New Guinea.
“While Villa was living in New York (in the late 1960s), the museum included several of these objects in a show titled ‘Art of the South Sea Islands.’ The relationship between these objects and Villa’s work is so strong, the curatorial team felt it’s distinctly possible he visited the museum in 1967,” said Tricia Laughlin Bloom, curator of American art at the museum.
The museum is located at 49 Washington St. in Newark. For more information, visit www.newarkmuseumart.org.
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