CURRENT EXHIBITION
Solo Show
All The While I Thought You Had Received This
February 2 - March 30, 2019
Monique Meloche Gallery
Opening reception: Saturday, February 2, 4 to 7pm
451 N Paulina Street
Chicago, IL 60622
All The While I Thought You Had Received This, 2018, Oil on panel, 33 x 48"
Maia Cruz Palileo: All The While I Thought You Had Received This February 2 – March 30, 2019
Opening reception: Saturday, February 2, 4 to 7pm
Press Release
moniquemeloche is pleased to present All The While I Thought You Had Received This, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Maia Cruz Palileo. This is her first solo show with the gallery and the first in her native Chicago. Informed by her family’s Filipino heritage, Palileo investigates larger questions pertaining to identity, history, migration, and belonging. The artist’s strategy for unraveling these long and tangled threads is itself born from from an intricately woven patchwork of sources and mediums; Palileo translates these materials into a novel formal language to describe a new world of her own making.
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Press for All The While I Thought You Had Received This:
Maia Cruz Palileo on memory and myth
by Juliana Halpert
February 14, 2019
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Finding my Filipino identity in Maia Cruz Palileo's Art
by Ann Binlot
February 4, 2019
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Smaller Museums And Galleries Shining In Chicago's Flourishing Arts Scene
by Chadd Scott
February 2, 2019
link
Chicago Magazine
Ten Things to Do This Week in Chicago
January 31, 2019
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RECENT NEWS
Maia Cruz Palileo is thrilled to be one of 25 incredible artists awarded a 2018 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant!
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RECENT EXHIBITIONS
Solo Show
All The While I Thought You Had Received This
February 2 - March 30, 2019
Monique Meloche Gallery
Opening reception: Saturday, February 2, 4 to 7pm
451 N Paulina Street
Chicago, IL 60622
All The While I Thought You Had Received This, 2018, Oil on panel, 33 x 48"
Maia Cruz Palileo: All The While I Thought You Had Received This February 2 – March 30, 2019
Opening reception: Saturday, February 2, 4 to 7pm
Press Release
moniquemeloche is pleased to present All The While I Thought You Had Received This, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Maia Cruz Palileo. This is her first solo show with the gallery and the first in her native Chicago. Informed by her family’s Filipino heritage, Palileo investigates larger questions pertaining to identity, history, migration, and belonging. The artist’s strategy for unraveling these long and tangled threads is itself born from from an intricately woven patchwork of sources and mediums; Palileo translates these materials into a novel formal language to describe a new world of her own making.
In 2017, through the Jerome Foundation’s Travel and Study Program Grant, Palileo conducted research at Chicago’s Newberry Library, which has one of the largest collections of Philippiniana in the world (comprised of the collections of Edward E. Ayer, an American who assembled a vast trove of Philippine 17th and 18th century manuscripts upon US victory over the Spanish at Manila Bay in 1898; and the photographic archive of Dean C. Worcester, an influential and controversial figure in the early years of American presence in the Philippines). These varied documents, spanning centuries and cultures, offered a kaleidoscopic vision of the Philippines as seen through numerous eyes, and recalled by multiple “natives” and “others.” Struck in particular by the exploitative gaze of Worcester’s ethnographic photographs, Palileo sought to resuscitate the figures he captured so problematically, and looked to Damián Domingo for inspiration. Considered the father of Philippine painting, Domingo set up the first Philippine art academy in 1821, an institution which implemented non-discriminatory practices, affirming the right to equality and respect for all who wished to study there. Domingo’s watercolors from the era confer humanity onto an array of different types and characters in and around Manila Bay, a sensibility which informed Palileo’s re-assessment of Worcester’s images:
“I began to draw figures, plants, landscapes, and other elements from the archive. Then, I cut out each drawing, creating a new library of cutouts: figures, plants, animals, interiors, boats, moons and mountains. The pieces were then placed in various arrangements and recorded via graphite rubbings. This process allowed for the cutouts to be combined into potentially infinite visual narratives.” The exhibition will feature a site-specific installation of these materials.
The resultant paintings present a potent amalgamation of Palileo’s research, bridging Spanish colonialism, the Filipino-American War, and the artist’s own understanding of a fractured and complex past. Hovering between fact and fiction, her expressive, gestural paintings are dream-like reveries rendered in dusky jewel-tones. Further inspired by Philippine folkloric motifs found in revolutionary Isabelo De Los Reyes’ book El Folk-lore Filipino(1889), as well as Nick Joaquín’s short stories, they present an uncanny realm; a magical realist landscape where histories comingle, ghosts are confronted, and alternative paths are forged. Through Palileo’s keen alchemy, a rich new historical record takes shape, one informed by a fluid and unfixed collective memory.
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Press for All The While I Thought You Had Received This:
Maia Cruz Palileo on memory and myth
by Juliana Halpert
February 14, 2019
link
Finding my Filipino identity in Maia Cruz Palileo's Art
by Ann Binlot
February 4, 2019
link
Smaller Museums And Galleries Shining In Chicago's Flourishing Arts Scene
by Chadd Scott
February 2, 2019
link
Chicago Magazine
Ten Things to Do This Week in Chicago
January 31, 2019
link
RECENT NEWS
Maia Cruz Palileo is thrilled to be one of 25 incredible artists awarded a 2018 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant!
link
Group Exhibition
Gold
Nov 3 - Dec 1, 2018
Yutaka Kikutake Gallery
6-6-9 2F Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-0032, Japan
images: Maia Cruz Palileo, Ian Grose, Massinissa Selmani
Press Release
Yutaka Kikutake Gallery is pleased to present group exhibition “GOLD” featuring three artists
Ian Grose, Maia Cruz Palileo and Massinissa Selmani. The shiny gleam of gold from the bottom
of a riverbed first caught our eye some 6,000 years ago. The precious metal has fascinated
people ever since, playing a role in religion, art, government, chemistry, and other manifestations
of human creativity. This exhibition uses art to explore something that captivates us like gold,
approaching the topic not from the cultural and historical background, but from a different
perspective altogether.
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Solo Show
The Way Back
Sep 25 — Oct 7
Taymour Grahne
93 Piccadilly, Mayfair, London W1J 7NQ
Maia Cruz Palileo, The Way Back, 2018, oil on canvas, 150x119.5cm
The works of Maia Cruz Palileo have long examined issues of migration and belonging, and the complexities and nuances of what she refers to as a ‘hyphenated concept of home’. However, where she has previously explored personal and familial histories, reconstructing memories and images from her family archive, these new works see Palileo reimagine the dominant colonialist depictions of Filipino culture. In doing so, she spent a month researching the paintings of Damián Domingo (1796–1834), Isabelo de los Reyes’ 1889 book El Folk-lore Filipino, as well as photographs from the Dean C. Worcester Archive at Chicago's Newberry Library. The 19th century view of the Philippines, through the eyes of these folklorists, artists and American government officials, painted a picture of its subjects (through the eyes of natives as well as ‘the other’), that, while poignant in places, was, more often than not, exploitative and dehumanizing.
Link
Press for The Way Back:
Press
ARTnews
Maia Cruz Palileo at Taymour Grahne, London
by The Editors of ARTNews
September 28, 2018
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Group Exhibition
Face of the Future
February 2 - November 4, 2018
Opening Celebration: Friday, February 23, 6-10 pm
The Rubin Museum / 150 West 17th Street / New York, NY
Face of the Future
Through November 4 in the Theatre Level
For Face of the Future, Chitra Ganesh reimagines how visual languages of science fiction and fantasy take shape and proliferate around the world in print culture, literature, and cinema. In addition to showcasing her own new works on paper and collage-based pieces, Ganesh has invited seven emerging artists—Maia Cruz Palileo, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Tammy Nguyen, Jagdeep Raina, Sahana Ramakrishnan, Anuj Shrestha, and Tuesday Smillie—to expand and redefine the aesthetics of science fiction by creating posters that refer to a group of important, influential films largely outside the Western canon.
Curated by Beth Citron.
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Group Exhibition
Cast of Characters
June 14 - September 16, 2018
LGBT Community Center / 201 W 13th Street / New York, NY
Cast of Characters is an immersive exhibition curated by Liz Collins featuring portraits by 95 LGBTQ artists.
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Two Person Show
Junk Envy
Jordan Buschur and Maia Cruz Palileo
August 10 - 24, 2018
Skylab Gallery / 57 E. Gay Street, 5th Floor / Columbus, OH
Junk Envy
Junk Envy features paintings and sculptures depicting personal collections by Jordan Buschur and Maia Cruz Palileo. Disposable objects- a can of AquaNet hairspray, batteries, pens, lipstick, Sharpies, cigarettes- all grow in stature when loaded with personal and cultural associations, memories and invented value. The cycle of consuming and disposing, fueling the economy and contributing to our collective over-consumptive demise is disrupted when a 1980s plastic comb is recreated in plaster and displayed on a shelf. Here is an object whose original use is no longer viable.
Both artists utilize mass-produced objects to point towards hidden, personal narratives. The original items, often cheap, skip from one type of value measurement to another to transcend their status as “junk”.
Group Exhibition
USPS
June 30 - July 7, 2018
Visual Arts, Architecture and Design School (VA {A}DS) Free University of Tbilisi
Kakha Bendukidze University Campus, # 240
David Aghmashenebeli Alley,
Tbilisi, Georgia
Exhibition of works on paper by 29 American artists. Curated by Dana Frankfort and Vera Iliatova.
Sonia Almeida, Yevgeniya Baras, Larissa Bates, Meghan Brady, Melissa Brown, Gary Burnley, Dawn Clements, Jennifer Coates, Jim Drain, Angela Dufresne, Dana Frankfort, Jackie Gendel, Christopher Ho, Vera Iliatova, Butt Johnson, Ryan Johnson, Darina Karpov, Steve Locke, Leeza Meksin, Ohad Meromi, John O’Connor, Bobbie Oliver, Maia Cruz Palileo, Sarah Peters, Dasha Shishkin, Cynthia Talmadge, Craig Taylor, Ashley Teamer, Susan Ziegler and Kevin Zucker
Solo Exhibition
Meandering Curves of a Creek
May 17 - July 8, 2018
OPENING RECEPTION: MAY 17, 7 - 9 pm
Pioneer Works / 159 Pioneer Street / Brooklyn, NY
MAY 17 - JUL 8
Meandering Curves of a Creek is Maia Cruz Palileo’s first solo institutional exhibition, comprised of a selection of recent paintings and drawings that continue the artist’s ongoing exploration of her personal identity, cultural heritage and feelings of multiplicity as a Filipino-American. This body of work traces a direct lineage to the ethnographic photographs of Dean C. Worcester, an American zoologist turned Secretary of the Interior who traveled to the Philippines at the turn of the nineteenth century. Palileo unearthed Worcester’s dehumanizing images in Chicago’s Newberry Library during the summer of 2017, and in turn used these photographs as a point of creative departure for transposing a bygone past into an intimately imagined world where history, myth, and superstition intersect.
Meandering Curves of a Creek is part of a special project made possible with support from the Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant.
Meandering Curves of a Creek is part of a special project made possible with support from the Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant.
Read more
Press for Meandering Curves of a Creek:
Beautiful imagery from an ugly past:
Maia Cruz Palileo, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn
by Ariella Budick
May 25, 2018
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Critic's Picks
by Cora Fisher
June 4, 2018
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All Arts: WLIW New York Public Media
Ancestral Stories: Maia Cruz Palileo at Pioneer Works
by Sarah Kricheff
May 18, 2018
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Press for Meandering Curves of a Creek:
Beautiful imagery from an ugly past:
Maia Cruz Palileo, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn
by Ariella Budick
May 25, 2018
link
Critic's Picks
by Cora Fisher
June 4, 2018
link
All Arts: WLIW New York Public Media
Ancestral Stories: Maia Cruz Palileo at Pioneer Works
by Sarah Kricheff
May 18, 2018
link
Group Exhibition
February 2 - March 28, 2018
Queering Space
Opening Reception: Friday, February 2, 6-9 pm
Fosdick-Nelson Gallery at Alfred University / 2 Pine Street / Alfred, NY
Fosdick-Nelson Gallery at Alfred University / 2 Pine Street / Alfred, NY
Group Exhibition
October 6th-November 3rd, 2017
The Alchemical Trace: Transformation and Resilience in Recent Work by LGBTQAI Artists
Curated by Ray Hernández-DuránOctober 6th-November 3rd, 2017
The Alchemical Trace: Transformation and Resilience in Recent Work by LGBTQAI Artists
Sanitary Tortilla Factory
401-403 2nd St SW
Albuquerque, NM 87102
Artists on Art Tour
September 1 and October 13, 2017 at 4:30 pm
Artists on Art Tour at Olana State Historic Site
I was invited by Olana to give an Artist on Art Tour of the exhibit Overlook, Teresita Fernández confronts Frederic Church at Olana. My tour will consider American values and their roots in manifest destiny, the construction of race, and how ethnography and anthropology were developed as a strategy to justify violence toward the indigenous population and people who were enslaved in the United States during the not so distant 19th century. These justifications carried over into westward expansion of Asia, when America colonized the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century.