I. Enter the Immigrant Experience

When visitors to the 2019 Singapore Biennale stepped through the doorway of Gallery A at the National Gallery Singapore, they immediately encountered a portal of another sort. A felt trilby hat was propped on a metal stand, flanked by two rows of black feather-covered door panels that appeared to recede into the distance toward a bronze tag inscribed “DESIRE.” Above the gateway floats the word “ORIENT.” Titled My Father Walking Up Kearny Street for the First Time (1993) this sculpture by Carlos Villa references his Filipino father’s arrival in San Francisco in the 1920s, and symbolizes the initial steps of someone embarking on a journey into the diaspora in order to pursue their hopes and dreams for a better future. Admission into the land of opportunity comes with a price, the work suggests. Protruding perpendicularly from the work’s left and right edges, so that they are hidden at first, are two vertical boards bearing the words “Silence” and “Self Loathe.”

The driving inspiration behind the 2019 Singapore Biennale, “Every Step In the Right Direction,” was the need and opportunity to offer a broadly conceived notion of change. It homed in on the gestures of artists who express awareness of what is not right with the world and who put forward solutions. Villa’s life and work represent this undertaking. In both his practices as a teacher and prolific artist, he attempted to not only render the migrant experience visible but also to reconcile cultural differences. He maintained a sense of optimism throughout his work as he strived to foster the conditions for a multicultural, cosmopolitan society. His perseverance ultimately created a legacy that ignited a discussion on diversity and inclusion in the arts in California.

Villa was born in 1936 in San Francisco to parents who had moved to the United States from the farming communities of the Philippines’s Ilocos region. They were part of the wave of migration of men (and a few women) from Asia, particularly China, in the early 1920s. Though Filipinos were US nationals until 1934, when the Philippines was nominally granted independence, they were also grouped together with other Asian communities and were subjected to the 19th-century-era Oriental Exclusion Acts, landowning restrictions, and anti-miscegenation laws in California. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s Filipinos became the targets of violent race riots.

Within these conditions of hostile race relations, Villa’s parents led frugal, hard-working lives as a janitor and a maid, residing in the working-class neighborhoods of the Tenderloin and Fillmore districts, in the then-still widely segregated Bay City. In an interview with Paul Karlstrom for the Smithsonian, Villa shared: “I remember my father driving around in my uncle’s car, and he was saying, ‘Well, this area is exclusive, that area is exclusive,’ Of course, what he meant was white only.” Yet, Villa continued, recalling his parents’ attitude: “Even though they’ve gone through a lot of rough shit they never ever thought of themselves as victims.” His family’s experience of these societal dynamics would come to fundamentally shape Villa’s artistic perspective.

It was through a family connection that Villa embarked on his journey in the arts. After Villa completed a stint as a soldier for the US Army in 1957, he asked to have his first drawing lesson from his cousin, Leo Valledor, an artist who would have a remarkable story of his own. Valledor would become a pioneering “hard-edge painter” in the 1960s after he moved to New York, where he helped seed the Soho art scene, showing alongside minimalists Robert Smithson and Sol LeWitt and other abstractionists of the time. Villa studied with his cousin while Valledor was still in California, and with funding from the GI Bill, he followed in Valledor’s footsteps and enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1958.

Within months, Villa ended up in the middle of San Francisco’s alternative scene. His debut was in the historic “Rat Bastards” show, curated by artist Bruce Conner at the Spatsa Gallery in 1958. The show was centered on a close-knit group dubbed the Rat Bastard Protective Association, who all convened at a Fillmore Street apartment, also known as “Painterland”—the center of the small San Francisco artworld from 1957 through 1965. This cohort of practitioners, whom Conner later identified as “people who were making things with the detritus of society, who themselves were ostracized or alienated from full involvement with society,” included painter Jay Defeo, who was associated with the counterculture Beat artists influenced by jazz and Asian conceptions of spirituality; Joan Brown, who was among the second generation of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, which opposed Abstract Expressionist dictates on image-making; and Conner himself, who embodied the Dada-esque spirit of the Beat generation with his experimental film, sculpture, and photography projects.

Villa’s contribution to “Rat Bastards” was a coffin made from a water-heater-box covered in red, white, and blue bunting that Villa had found on the street. The installation decried the gentrification of downtown San Francisco, and was paraded down North Beach toward Spatsa. For an added layer and as a playful touch, Brown created a plaster wreath and plaque inscribed “He died for love,” a tongue-in-cheek critique of US nationalism and warmongering. The parade amassed around 200 participants as it progressed.

Simultaneously, at the California School of Fine Arts, Villa was receiving a different kind of education. Most of the institution’s professors were transitioning from Abstract Expressionism to incorporating figurative elements into their works, seeding the Bay Area Figurative Movement. During his time as a student, Villa created abstract compositions in line with the early approach of his professors, using paint that he applied with his hands and industrial materials such as tar, citing as an influence William Paul Morehouse, who encouraged his students to use “non-art” elements.

Another teacher Villa studied under at the school was the painter Walt Kuhlman. Villa asked him whether there was an art history of the Philippines. His teacher promptly responded: “Nope, I don’t think there is.” Of course there was, but the early trajectories of modern Filipino art in the 1880s and the written materials about this history were not accessible to even the best art schools in white America in the 1950s.

The obscurity of the information about his own heritage would eventually serve as the impetus for one of Villa’s lifelong quests—to create what he called a “visual anthropology” documenting his personal search for people who shared his non-white background, and to advocate for their inclusion in the canon of art history in the US.

II. Rituals of Discovery

In 1969, after a six-year stint in New York, during which he predominantly produced minimalist, geometric sculptures in wood and metal, all the while working as a busboy, Villa returned home to San Francisco. He became the first artist-in-residence at the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Center, which served Black and Asian youth. This experience had a tremendous impact on Villa, who explained: “I saw these young guys asserting themselves . . . You know, the Black kids with their afros and dashikis [and the] Chinese kids who had completely their own style, their own hairdo, their own style of cars. And I saw how important that was. Somehow it kind of hit. The idea of a self-affirmation.”

With his curiosity about his own heritage rekindled, he began to look into the genealogies of Filipinos. He was fascinated by the Aetas, the Philippines’s first inhabitants, whom the Spanish colonizers called negritos. The Aetas are part of the Australo-Melanesian group, which also encompasses the Papuan, Aborigine, Vanuatu, and Fijian peoples. Their ancestral lineage can be traced back 50,000 years to the African continent. At San Francisco’s De Young Museum, Villa pored over the artifacts and books of the Africa and Oceania ethnographic collections. A result of his research was Tat2 (1969), a series of photographic self-portraits, on which Villa drew Filipino and Pacific Islander tattoo motifs. For Villa, this was a recuperative strategy to transmute his sense of lost identity.

Another nod to his Austronesian lineage is his use of feathers throughout his body of work. This gesture stems from the material’s abundance in the clothing and ceremonial objects he came across in the De Young collections. Vibrant fuchsia, canary-yellow, and green feathers line the left and right edges of Senorita II (c. 1970s), for example, and the dramatic texture of Mask – Unmask (1977) can be credited to the fluffy and pointed, quill-like embellishments.

Additionally, Villa often incorporated other organic matter such as pig’s blood and animal bones, as in Witnessing (1975), a composition on paper with densely interwoven spirals reminiscent of viscera, on top of which the artist laid out the bones of a chicken. Over the work’s glass cover, he imprinted his hands and face in white paint. Witnessing’s natural components allude to the food preparations that Villa had seen in his mother’s kitchen. For Untitled (Blood on paint on unstretched canvas) (1970), he stirred animal blood into acrylic paint and applied the mixture in wavering stacks of oval shapes, combining his abstractionist impulses and proclivity for referential organic materials. As historian Margo Machida has pointed out, this “was not really to recover an atavistic notion of authenticity but rather a necessary act of self-assertion by recuperating the indigenous form with an abstract or modernist sensibility.”

At the same time, the body itself gained in importance. Building on his formal interest in Frank Stella’s cut canvases, and in Henri Matisse’s quirky designs for the chasubles worn by the priests at the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence in France, Villa created Painted Cloak (1970–71), a canvas adorned with painted taffeta and feathers meant to be worn like a shaman’s cape. To go with the ritual garments Villa later fashioned a pair of shoes from paper pulp, and festooned them with the plumage of domestic guinea fowls, roosters, and geese. The work, Artist Feet (1978), was also partly inspired by René Magritte’s surreal painting of a pair of disembodied feet replete with laces, Le Modèle Rouge (1923).

Villa’s exploration of the body through garments and even shoes culminated in performances where he donned his own painted ceremonial clothing, slipping into the role of a shaman who mediated ancient and contemporary, Western and Othered worlds. In Ritual: A Painting Performance/Interaction (1980), for instance, presented at an alternative art space called the Farm in San Francisco, he melded an ancient African cosmogony with action painting. In particular, Villa made reference to a Dogon myth about twin gods who birthed the world. The event began with Villa transferring his elaborate cape to his collaborator, artist Tom Seligman. Naked, Villa turned to the canvas laid out on the hay-strewn ground next to what appeared to be the husk of a body made from glued feathers. Villa crawled around the edges of the canvas, painting with black pigment an egg-shaped Dogon symbol signifying life. With his eyes closed, Villa then enacted repetitive movements like bowing, kneeling, and stepping forward. A drummer, saxophonist, and performers playing Filipino kulintang instruments accompanied his movements.

According to art historian Moira Roth’s 1989 account of the work, “At one point, beneath the music, a tape was played of Villa’s mother telling her son in a matter-of-fact way how to prepare a pig for killing in Filipino style by giving the animal sweet vinegar to soften its pain.” As he slowly applied paint on his body, and imprinted his face, hands, and feet onto the canvas, creating twin images of his body, he was in a near-hypnotic state.

Roth recollects that Seligman described the performance as “an amazing burst of energy. The most telling part was at the end. Carlos was wiped out, absolutely emotionally drained. He was going through some sort of catharsis.” Villa himself explained: “At the time I had just learned tai chi. I went through the movements as if I were doing a set of tai chi. I was breathing through my nose. By the time I got to putting paint on my body, I was actually in a trance. A set of tai chi is done in 10–15 minutes but I did them for an hour and a half. I was completely unaware of everything around me except I remembered the sequences which Tom and I had rehearsed once or twice.”

III. “Other Sources”

Besides his artistic practice, Villa blazed many other trails. In 1976, he curated the exhibition “Other Sources: An American Essay” at the Walter and McBean Galleries of his alma mater, known then as the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). The show featured about 90 works by 45 American artists from the Bay Area whose ancestral origins or artistic inspirations were rooted in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific. Villa’s goal was to have as many women as men in the exhibition, and with the help of SFAI and the neighborhood artist program of the San Francisco Arts Commission, he constructed a multilevel showcase of painting, sculpture, film, performance, and video. Artist and historian Mark Johnson recalled that the displays overflowed the galleries and filled the courtyards. The show’s flyer also advertised a weekend celebration filled with activities, from musical and dance events to poetry recitals involving over 200 contributors.

SFAI director Philip Linhares called the initiative assertive in its aesthetic, social, and political content. The projects recognized countless centuries of communal existence, spoke of the experiences of the disenfranchised, or offered profound understandings of nature and a deeply integral sense of ritual. Included in the show was Robert Colescott’s canvas Homage to Delacroix: Liberty Leading the People (1976), an appropriation of the iconic work with black figures inserted, referencing the “double consciousness” of African Americans and other marginalized populations who are forced to see their history through the eyes of their oppressors. Rupert Garcia presented his striking pastel drawing of a gagged figure, Political Prisoner (1976). Native American artists like Linda Lomahaftewa and Frank LaPena gestured to ritual and ceremony with their respective paintings Hopi Bird (1974) and Hand Game Gambling Set (1975), which both fuse abstraction with Indigenous imageries and emblems.

Though it was years ahead of multiculturalist global exhibitions in Europe and East Coast cities, “Other Sources” followed a trajectory from “A Third World Painting Sculpture Exhibition,” organized in 1974 by artist-curators Rolando Castellón, Ruth Tamura, and Raymond Saunders at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Both “Other Sources” and “A Third World” were symptoms of a diversifying collective cultural consciousness in the Bay Area at the time. In her 2008 essay Art and Social Consciousness: Asian American and Pacific Islander Artists in San Francisco 1965–80, artist and historian Margo Machida writes that “for Asians in the US, the power of art and visual culture to help frame and articulate a sense of place in the contemporary world was increasingly conceived as a means of projecting a distinctly Asian American culture and sensibility . . . The post-1965 period, therefore, is distinguished by the emergence of a heightened Asian American cultural consciousness among many visual artists.” Simultaneously, community-based and ethnic-specific cultural organizations were forming—and starting to mobilize into campaigns and strike actions, along with the rise of the Black Power Movement and solidarity campaigns for the Third World anti-colonial struggles. Strikes by minority student groups that united under the name Third World Liberation Front led to the foundation of the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University in 1968 and a department of Asian American Studies at University of California Berkeley in 1969.

And yet, though “Other Sources” took place amid a politically charged time when issues of representation were surfacing, it had aims beyond tokenism. By gathering diverse people, Villa was hoping to prompt conversations for collaborative change—to “get down to some real humanism,” in his words.  

IV. A World in Collision

In the late 1980s, after a pause in his pursuit of bringing people together, during which he made personal paper-based sculptures relating to the breakup of his marriage, the notion of dialogues came to define Villa’s projects. Reflecting on this turning point in his career, he said: “What I wanted to know was, what is it an artist had to do post-Martin Luther King? What are the issues now that an artist of color had to face? And when I thought of that dialogue, or when I thought of that issue, I didn’t think that just artists of color or minority artists should be the only ones to answer that question. I brought in white artists also and white administrators, and writers to talk about those issues, too.”

The result was the series of symposia: “The Agenda for the 1990s,” “Sources of a Distinct Majority,” “A Challenge to Institutions, a Contextual Symposium” and “Toward a Culturally Inclusive Art Education.” Held between 1989 and 1992 under the umbrella title “Worlds in Collision,” and staged primarily at the galleries and classrooms of SFAI, these discussions were later compiled as a publication in 1995. For these talks, Villa invited artists and scholars to share their proposed strategies for the inclusion of marginalized artists in the narrative of contemporary art, as well as their varied perspectives on the significance of a truly “multiculturalist” history, and the issue of institutional oppression in the US. The “Worlds in Collision” series continued to expand, encompassing events such as the roundtable conference at SFAI “Rehistoricizing the Time around Abstract Expressionism in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1950s–1970s” in 2005.

“Worlds in Collision” also evolved into a class that he taught about the diverse concerns of artists, activists, academics, and scholars from both ethnically marginalized and mainstream communities. Villa’s construction of the syllabus for the course reflected his capacity as an artist-educator. He said, “I viewed the construction of a syllabus as relevant visually and thematically as a drawing.” And indeed the relationship between the concerns of his own artistic practice and the curriculum is apparent. Among readings on the art and culture of Chicano, African American, Asian, Native American, and South American communities, the class notes include prompts such as: “Examine if origins + past are present,” and “What are the nutrient sources of this art history?” “I think that we have an incredible vision here . . . and hopefully a collaborative action. Because of all of these voices, we’re getting some sense . . . of our personal history and our history as it interfaces with each other,” Villa said of the “Worlds in Collision” curriculum and symposia.

Right up until his death in 2013, Villa worked to create another line of history, one that started on the inside, with his own self-exploration, and splintered to encompass the tangle of artists outside and inside of the canon. He challenged his contemporaries to conceive of a new paradigm in which art could be understood and created, and led the charge himself. Above all, he sought connection. He lived life full on, with no regrets, like the title of one of his last works, a red-and-black painting: (not) Sorry (c. 2011–12).