Pacita Abad: Colors of My Dream

Pio Abad is a London-based artist whose wide-ranging work mines alternative or repressed histories and offers counternarratives that draw out threads of complicity and entanglements between and within objects, incidents, ideologies, and people. Deeply informed by unfolding events in the Philippines, where the artist was born and raised, his work emanates from the personal and familial woven into the political and national. Abad has exhibited at the 58th Carnegie International; the 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennial; Ateneo Art Gallery, Manila; and elsewhere. Abad’s works are part of a number of important collections including Tate, UK and Hawai’i State Art Museum, Honolulu. Abad is also the curator of the estate of his aunt, Filipino American artist Pacita Abad.

Camille Hoffman’s practice is a ceremony of reconfiguration and critical reflection on the romantic American landscape. Considering the embedded and latent meanings around light, nature, the frontier, borders, race, gender and power in influential American landscape paintings, she uses materials collected from childhood and her everyday life to craft imaginary landscapes that are grounded in accumulation, personal narrative, and historical critique. Taking inspiration from the Philippine weaving and storytelling traditions of her ancestors, along with traditional landscape painting techniques from her academic training, she interweaves image with refuse to reveal seamless yet textured transcultural contradictions. She lives and works in New York City and teaches at The Cooper Union.

Emmy Catedral is a NY-based artist, writer, and educator whose installation, performance, texts, and collaborative acts of acentering have been presented under pseudo-institutional personas and as herself. Emmy was born in Butuan and raised in East Harlem and Queens, where she lives and tends to the NY-collection of the bi-coastal Pilipinx American Library. She has previously held positions at Distributed Art Publishers, and Printed Matter, and is currently Curator of Public Programs at the emergent Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), where she also oversees the selection and operations of the bookstore.

Art historian Jessamine Batario specializes in modern and contemporary art. She received her PhD in Art History from The University of Texas at Austin. Batario currently lives in Waterville, Maine, where she is the Linde Family Foundation Curator of Academic Engagement at the Colby College Museum of Art. She was the guest critic for the Rail in March 2020.