We celebrate some of the most consequential women artists in our generation by presenting challenging bodies of work that are courageous and critically engaged. While the past decade has witnessed a notable increase of female representation in the arts, with museums reorganizing their collections to highlight previously ignored work and gallery programming showing more of their work, research indicates that efforts should steadily continue. Many female artists are still overlooked, and their work significantly undervalued. Championing gender equity in the arts needs to be a conscious commitment; as the Guerrilla Girls say, “We just have to keep chipping away.”

Female artists have been historically ignored or systematically excluded partly because of the mediums they have chosen to work with, typically not oil on canvas but more accessible textile, ceramics, paper or cardboard, and common industrial materials. The past decade has also witnessed changing perceptions on the hierarchy of mediums, along with the general drive for diversity and inclusivity.

Beyond presentation, an equally important aspect in platforming these artists is the network of support and new research that develops in every show. The exhibit brings together an array of art that responds to the current moment, exploring a multiplicity of issues including body politics, female labor, psychology, spirituality, relationships with nature and place, and new ways of understanding history.

Aze Ong weaves together three different stages of her 15 years’ artistic practice with fiber. The first decade was marked by material experimentation in creating various forms. The next five years was an exploration of possibilities with performance and interaction in the public space through mobile sculpture. This phase became a transition from material to more spiritual practices of calming the mind in coping with personal trials during the pandemic. Currently, Ong fully embraces her gained spirituality as she ruminates on the beginnings of her practice— a period when her work was classified as craft and less appreciated as art. Despite the struggle, she made these early works “with intense flaming joy”. Fiber art is now generally accepted as an art form. The massive crochet installation mends past with present. She affirms, “Forgiveness is important in spiritual healing.”

Brisa Amir’s earlier frottage works captured physical impressions of a city through rubbings and a slow collection of daily markings on paper, sometimes made by elements from the environment itself. Her practice later evolved to a color field-like approach, still carrying traces of texture but shifting to the atmospheric, in a similar vein to Georgia O’Keeffe’s translations of natural forms to expansive fields of color. Amir’s recent work is inspired by the way nature exists and reclaims space within the urban landscape. She is more concerned with the process of intuitive mark-making and collage-- one she considers raw, pure and free. “Slow painting allows me to embrace a feeling where material, time and intuition converge into something both meditative and visceral.”

Christina Lopez bridges the history of early computing with contemporary artistic techniques. She prints onto computer punch cards, once essential for programming, now obsolete. The first programmers were often women, who would punch the cards and insert them into the machines. Generally relegated to clerical and secretary jobs, women played a foundational yet largely unrecognized role in technological advancement. Each hole in the punch card carried precise numerical data that dictated machine operations. Lopez subverts this rigid, standardized procedure by employing a large format printer, using it like an airbrush to build images through layers of color and shadow. The resulting composition has a surreal, evanescent quality contrasting the stark functionality of its medium. She relates the process to loops and cycles, drawing parallels between computational repetition and broader themes of labor history—how patterns resurface, evolve, and persist over time. Computing is still labor-intensive but in a different, somewhat obfuscated way. Artificial intelligence for example is dependent on cataloguing and archiving, very tedious library-like work. Lopez reveals hidden forces that influence technology and art, offering poetic potential within systems of control and exactitude.

Faye Abantao’s digital collages of image transfers on paper have recently been void of human figures. Without the humans, there is an immediate sense of loss and displacement. Her diptych of nearly identical landscapes—one featuring a weathered wooden cabin and the other an empty expanse where the structure once stood—give an even more pronounced sense of absence. The missing cabin becomes a metaphor for the transient imprint we leave on the world. Abantao questions whether a place retains its essence even after its physical markers disappear. Is our connection to a place defined by its physicality or does it persist beyond material presence? The muted, textured aesthetic of the image transfers reinforces the feeling of dimming memory and fading permanence, as if the scene itself is disintegrating. In its simplicity, the work eloquently conveys the fragility of human existence and the landscapes we inhabit.

Jan Sunday embarks on a new series from her textile work. She departs from her familiar disruption of religious imagery, turning to flora and fauna as subject. Yet these elements from nature persist in her exploration of symbolism and spirituality, emphasizing the divine interconnectedness of life. The moth-like form, made with intricate embroidery, detailed embellishment and a layering of rich blue fabrics give a sense of reverence for the complex design that exists in the most micro patterns in nature to the grand movements of heavenly bodies. The artist regards nature as evidence of God as divine structure: “the gossamer thread that holds everything in place, from the cosmos to the fibers of our material existence, to the quantum particles of every matter.”

Jel Suarez creates collage and assemblage works that represent symbolic fragmentation and reconstruction. Parts of printed matter, such as old books, illustrations and other objects are repurposed and layered into new visual narratives. The collages in this exhibit comprise serigraph prints, introducing variation on an image, and merging the exactness of printmaking with the spontaneity of collage. Suarez engages in a meticulous process of making the matrix, printing, cutting or tearing, assembling and reconfiguring, every fragment carefully considered before securing its place. There is a deference for the intimate materiality of paper and how it ages or tells stories. Text clippings, black ink and muted tones summon lived experience and nostalgia. The juxtaposition of ambiguous forms and recognizable imagery becomes a conjecture of language reinterpreted, and history being rewritten.

Jill Paz conceptualized “Palms” and “Jungle” when Taal volcano erupted in 2020. The landscape surrounding her Cavite studio was covered in ash—"grey, muted, and quiet”. She converts these views into what she considers interior landscapes. Paz immigrated from Canada to the Philippines, a move that informs her studio practice of using Balikbayan box cardboard as substrate. The cardboard is a poor, DIY prototype material, which she combines with laser technology, thus subverting technology to weave high and low art, the analog and digital. She photographs the landscape and essentializes the images through drawing, pixelation, and laser carving. Finally, she airbrushes layers of colors to emphasize hue, tonality and depth, interpreting colors and textures into visceral, tactile, emotional collage-paintings.

Katarina Estrada’s drawings are a two-part work that explores the dynamism of creative energy. It is an effort to make visible that porous and ungraspable pulse within the human body. The first piece “It only ever unfolds” shows the resistance and pull of creative forces, informing the second piece “Held and soft and even softer”—a tender embrace that exemplifies a state of grace, proposing that creation arises not by pure control but through surrender. She suggests that whether ideas begin as a sudden spark or grow quietly over time, they eventually exit the maker in the form of a physical object. “On its way out, it leaves room for more to enter, for in that vacated space, something else is born.”

Kelli Maeshiro’s installation made from common industrial materials and everyday objects creates an environment for viewers to weave through, explore, and ponder. Titled "sincere under a veneer of restraint", she infuses her memory of rain while being in the ocean--the loudness of raindrops falling on the water’s surface, or its muffled sounds when heard from underwater, and the thunder of waves tumbling onto shore. It is an homage to her hometown of Honolulu, “to its mango season rains, and to the Pacific ocean’s ironic name”. The work continues from Maeshiro’s series of installation pieces exploring experiential memories of places in time, imbuing the work with a sense of the supermelodic, euphoric, and cacophonous.

Krista Nogueras progresses from her ceramic practice of sculpting creatures as a means of analyzing psychological theory. Her recent artist residency in Bali led her to study their local philosophies on the relationship between physical and spiritual realms. Balinese rituals resonated with her artmaking process—the ceremonial act of preparing the clay through purification and manipulation, creating a dialogue between material and her inner self, and the offering of complex emotions through the firing process. Her ceramic installation “Divine Unravelling”, individual sculptures attached vertically on a single rope, expresses movement mid-flight, as these creatures simultaneously ascend to the gods and descend back to earth. It is a symbolic reminder of the human spirit’s transformations through life’s journey.

Lesley-Anne Cao continues “Three and a Half Billion Years,” a series of steel boxes containing different magnets and metallic items, relating these objects and compositions to the idea of the earth itself being a magnet. While the work is not interactive, it carries the potential of magnets as objects that can be moved, detached, rearranged, or removed completely. A magnet, while small and pliable, has the strength to shift by attracting or repelling other objects within its field. Perceived in terms of landscape, magnetic force is an underlying presence in the earth. Its magnetic field is formed by electric current in the earth’s iron core as it circulates with the planet’s rotation. Cao inquires “What do landscapes say about what is visible, legible and intelligible to us?”

Mac Valdezco is known for sculptural work that challenges conventional perceptions of form and space, manipulating everyday materials into organic shapes and installations. Her paintings likewise explore dynamic, biomorphic forms that invite speculation. “Paghanga at mga imahinasyon sa mga bagay na Supernatural at mga hindi kilalang bagay” evoke a dimension beyond human awareness, pertaining to both the scientific and the otherworldly. The forms suggest microscopic life, celestial phenomena, or perhaps a pulsating presence and other unseen forces. The supernatural is presented as an extension of nature’s mysteries; the unknown not as something to fear but to marvel at. In her paintings, the threshold between the real and the imagined blur, leaving room for discovery and wonder.

Tekla Tamoria embroidered 60 pieces of cloth with images of a woman attempting to untangle strips of thread. The menial act of untangling is analogous to the endurance required in everyday life, where progress is slow, but hope remains steadfast. The choice of floral fabric speaks of softness, while each thread is comparably a facet of female subsistence that requires the tough act of multitasking. Tamoria’s work serves as a poignant meditation on female labor—the quiet strength supporting domestic, artistic, and professional livelihood. By hanging the pieces like a clothesline, she connects a daily chore to collective struggle and aspirations passed down through generations. In addition, Tamoria presents an animation piece, a project that requires frame by frame construction. By doing so, she highlights the dedication, routine and continuous journey of artmaking in different mediums.

The works on exhibit are a sample from each artist’s ongoing investigations. Instead of imposing a woman-centered theme, we invited them to share parcels of insight into the evolution of their work. In championing these artists, the exhibit underscores the vital role of women in art and society, fostering sustained recognition and support for their valued contributions.

By Stephanie Frondoso