‘Art Phair’ to showcase Fil-Am artists at Festival of Philippine Art and Culture

Village in a Bottle, monoprint by John Yoyogi Fortes

SAN PEDRO, Calif. – FilAm Arts’ 30th Annual Festival of Philippine Art and Culture (FPAC) presents its inaugural “Art Phair,” an alternative art fair that gives communities an opportunity to view and collect artwork by contemporary Filipino American visual artists.

Filipino and Fil-Am artists have long been underrepresented in museums and galleries, remaining largely unknown to the Fil-Am community and the public at large, according to organizers. The “Art Phair” aims to foster new fans and patrons of Filipino American visual art.

The eight artists in the Art Phair comprise a diverse group from Northern and Southern California, with influences stemming from their backgrounds as Fil-Ams, but who do not create art solely from this space.

Meet the artists

Nica Aquino is a Los Angeles-based visual artist, curator and cultural producer. She primarily experiments with 35mm analog photography, documenting life as she sees it, using an everyday point-and-shoot camera.

Naguilian (La Union), photograph by Nica Aquino

Edmund Arevalo is a first-generation Filipino American painter and sculptor who lives and works in Los Angeles. His work tells the stories of colonial histories, familial narratives and the Filipino diaspora.

Nicanor Evangelista Jr. practices Batok and Kali to honor his ancestors and express his animistic approach to life. He creates sacred geometric mandalas that are embedded with animistic Filipino culture.

John Yoyogi Fortes is a Sacramento-based painter whose work explores physical and psychological landscapes of self, culture and identity through a bicultural lens. His paintings depict an obscure world of artistic styles, dark humor and wordplay.

Carol Anne McChrystal is a Los Angeles-based visual artist whose material-driven works take the form of the traditional plaited mats of her two island homelands, Ireland and the Philippines.

Elyse Pignolet is an American of Filipino heritage living and working in Los Angeles. Elyse works primarily in ceramics and her work is inspired by and deals with themes such as the dialectic between feminism and misogyny, inequality and cultural stereotypes.

200 Million Hours, ceramic tile by Elyse Pignolet

San Francisco-based artist Carlo Ricafort’s paintings pepper western-style Expressionism with notions of primitivism, giving license to aesthetic naiveté and serving as self-conscious takes on what might be thought of as “modern primitivism.”

Peeping, monotype by Carlo Ricafort

Rodolfo Samonte is a distinguished Filipino artist known for his mastery of reductive and minimalistic art forms. With a rich academic background in Fine Arts and printmaking, Samonte’s works have garnered recognition and accolades locally and internationally.

Art Phair programming will include an Artist Talk beginning at the Discovery Stage and followed by an artist-led walk-through, a “sala space” (sala means “living room” in Tagalog) featuring a banig-influenced installation, and short video segments about established contemporary Fil-Am artists, such as Pacita Abad, Santiago Bose, Paul Pfeiffer, Stephanie Syjuco and Carlos Villa, among others.

Date: Saturday, September 14, 2024

Venue: Festival of Philippine Art and Culture (FPAC)

Location: Point Fermin Park, San Pedro, 807 Paseo Del Mar in San Pedro, CA 90731

Festival hours: Noon to 9 p.m.

Art Phair hours: Noon to 6 p.m.

Artist Talk & Walk-through: 2:30-3:30 p.m.

Admission is free. For more information, visit FPAC and FilAm Arts.

You may like: Festival of Philippine Arts & Culture to celebrate 30th anniversary