Carlos Villa: Worlds in Collision presents the first major museum retrospective dedicated to the work of a Filipino American artist, celebrating the groundbreaking career of Carlos Villa (1936-2013).

Villa’s paintings, drawings, sculptures, self-portraits, and performance art are filled with imagery inspired by his study of non-Western art and culture, including ethnographic objects he observed in museum collections. In his mixed media works from the late 1960s onward, Villa created feathered assemblages on unstretched canvas, evoking shamanic capes, the robes of Hawaiian nobility, and the Catholic vestments of his altar-boy youth. In later works he created body prints and body castings to center his own brown body in contemporary art. Showcasing thirty-six works created between 1959 and 2011, Carlos Villa: Worlds in Collision introduced a remarkable contemporary artist to new audiences, illuminating the social and cultural roots, as well as the global importance, of Villa’s art. (Newark Museum of Art)

The retrospective was first presented at the Newark Museum of Art, NJ, from 17 February to 8 May 2022, and toured to the West coast with concurrent exhibitions at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (Carlos Villa: Worlds in Collision, 17 June – 24 October 2022) and the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries (Carlos Villa: Roots and Reinvention, 24 June – 20 August 2022).

Carlos Villa (1936 – 2013) was a San Francisco-born visual artist, grass-roots activist, curator, author, and educator at the San Francisco Art Institute, among other Bay Area institutions. He spent five years in New York exploring abstraction before shifting away from minimalism to begin his ground-breaking practice of incorporating cultural motifs and materials into his works. He collided feathers, bone, and physical body prints to create strangely-human works that challenged colonial perspectives and laid radical claim to a cross-cultural, diasporic identity. It was Villa’s legacy to render Filipino art history visible and incarnate a foundation for artists to come.

In 2022, Villa received the first-ever major museum retrospective dedicated to the work of a Filipino American artist, which toured bi-coastal from The Newark Museum of Art to the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, and Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Additional accolades include Villa’s 2011 solo retrospective Manongs, Some Doors and a Bouquet of Crates at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, and Other Sources: An American Essay, a multidisciplinary, multiethnic exhibition centered around women and artists of color, curated by Villa and presented in conjunction with the 1976 American Bicentennial. Villa is co-represented by Silverlens (New York/Manila) and Anglim/Trimble (San Francisco).