Others, like Stephanie Syjuco, explore their own ancestral or diasporic relationship with New Orleans. Through a series of murals that spans multiple venues, the Manila-born, Oakland-based artist re-maps Louisiana’s village of St. Malo, the first Filipino settlement in the US. That these prints – collectively called ‘Phantom Visions (The Lacustrine Village of St. Malo)’ (2024) – are made of wheat paste is no mistake: with weather and time, they will disintegrate and disappear, just as St. Malo did over a century ago.

Beyond an artist, Pio Abad is at once an investigator and ethnoarchaeologist, the exhibition an exposé and reckoning of his findings. ‘To Those Sitting in Darkness’ is a melancholic lamentation of immense cultural loss; not just of Filipinos but of the globally marginalized—that one needs to leave the motherland to encounter our unknown narratives and history.

They included two Filipino artists because they are part of “a shared imperial history that left a mark on their names.” The Philippines went through both Spanish colonization and U.S. occupation, and its people are often mistaken for Latinos in this country owing to their Spanish-sounding names. […] Norberto Roldan presents a series of altar-like assemblages of abandoned objects, materials, and debris from a gentrifying neighborhood in Quezon City—which, to the curators, recall the syncretic altars often found in Latino households.