First-Ever Museum Retrospective of Iconic Filipino American Artist and Educator Carlos Villa at Asian Art Museum, San Francisco Arts Commission, and San Francisco Art Institute

SAN FRANCISCO, April 12, 2022

– Carlos Villa: Worlds in Collision, co-organized by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and the San Francisco Art Institute, invites

you into artist Carlos Villa’s (1936–2013) spectacular, visually magical worlds of feathers and bones, capes and masks, tattoos and blood. The first major museum retrospective dedicated to the work of a Filipino American artist — featuring many works rarely seen before

— Worlds in Collision celebrates Villa's exuberant body of work and enduring influence as a teacher, curator, and activist. Starting this June at the Asian Art Museum, with a concurrent exhibition at the nearby San Francisco Arts Commission Main Gallery (SFAC), and culminating in September at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), Worlds in Collision is an opportunity for audiences to trace Villa’s movement-spanning career. The exhibition explores Villa’s San Francisco immigrant roots, his adaptation of non-Western creative traditions, and his still-vibrant impact on the art world today.

“Carlos Villa was a legend in creative circles for his groundbreaking, ‘polycultural’ approaches, as well as the inspiration he provided to his countless students at SFAI — including household names like Obama portraitist Kehinde Wiley — yet he remains little known.

to many fans and scholars of modern and contemporary art. This exhibition could not be more timely, as museums across the world are diligently reexamining the narrative of art history they present,” says Dr. Jay Xu, the Barbara Bass Bakar Director and CEO of the Asian Art Museum. “We’ve expanded the Asian Art Museum precisely so we could share more contemporary art, and more kinds of contemporary art, than ever before. We’re thrilled to collaborate with so many important San Francisco arts organizations to bring Villa’s important story to new audiences and offer a unique, much-needed perspective on Asian American artistic exchange and cultural identity — to update the canon, if you will.”

“Before, I was told who I was . . .

Through the practice of art, I became who I am.” —Carlos Villa

Carlos Villa: Worlds in Collision is on view from Jun. 17 to Oct. 24, 2022, at the Asian Art Museum. The exhibition spreads across two galleries and features 14 of Villa’s mostly large-scale artworks created in the 1970s and early 1980s. These eye-catching, highly textured works freely reference non-Western sources as well as Villa’s own personal history. Villa drew on African, Asian, and Oceanic art and tradition, and he incorporated unexpected materials ranging from hair, spit, and sperm to shells, feathers, mirrors, and silk. He even used his own body and face as a “brush” to impart a kind of signature.

The title Worlds in Collision is inspired by a revolutionary course that Carlos Villa taught at SFAI that aimed to decolonize art history's white, Eurocentric focus, and whose syllabus is still in use. He extended this effort beyond the classroom through public “actions” — an allusion to his interrelated practices of teaching, curating, organizing, and performing — that advocated for dissolving hierarchies between low and high art, promoting community collaboration, and centering the voices of artists of color.

The main presentation takes place in the museum’s Osher Foundation Gallery and showcases an exciting selection of Villa’s surviving constructions (many other similarly significant works.

One Artist, Three Venues, Many Stories

From Jun. 16 to Sep. 3, 2022, the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries will present Carlos Villa: Roots and Reinvention. This presentation highlights Villa's art from the 1980s and 1990s, which shifted away from large abstract works with body impressions to works that delved into the history of Filipinos in America, immigration, and Villa’s own family archives.

From Sep. 21, 2022, to Feb. 11, 2023, the San Francisco Art Institute will host Carlos Villa: Worlds Reimagined, with more than two dozen works dating from the 1950s until Villa’s death in 2013. Both summer exhibition venues (the Asian Art Museum and SFAC) are within walking distance of each other across Civic Center Plaza, and can be easily visited in one day. SFAI is located in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, less than 2 miles from Civic Center.

Carlos Villa: Worlds in Collision is curated by Trisha Lagaso Goldberg (SFAI) and Mark Dean Johnson (San Francisco State University), and coordinated at the Asian Art Museum by Abby Chen, the museum’s head of contemporary art. Both Lagaso Goldberg and Johnson worked closely with Villa during his lifetime. The San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries’ exhibition is a project organized by Director Meg Shiffler and Associate Curator Jackie Im in partnership with Lagaso Goldberg and Johnson.

“Carlos Villa was a true voice from the margins who changed the way artists, critics, and activists approached the center,” says co-curator Lagaso Goldberg. “Carlos was a preeminent Asian American artist in the early days of multiculturalism, and this exhibition introduces his work and legacy to a wider audience. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and his works appeared in exhibitions at New York’s Whitney Museum and San Francisco’s de Young — yet