Pioneering feminist artist Imelda Cajipe Endaya stages her first solo exhibition in the U.S. in nearly 20 years, There is Still a Tomorrow, Mother, curated by Eugenie Tsai at Silverlens New York. The show features works spanning from 1982 to 2023, and captures what the artist has focused on for nearly half a century: the role of Filipino women through the arc of history. Through colonialism, war, and dictatorship, the stories of Filipino women had long been neglected. In these works, Cajipe Endaya not only depicts their plight, but incorporates the very materials touched by their lives and labor – cloth gloves, woven bamboo, crocheted textile – asserting their craft as a form of resistance. Her works, while rooted in the Philippines, are an urgent reminder of the creative power of the marginalized, especially amid state suppression. IMELDA CAJIPE ENDAYA: There is Still a Tomorrow, Mother will be on view at Silverlens New York May 8 – June 21, 2025. 

Cajipe Endaya emerged as an artist as the Philippines slipped under the shadow of Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorial regime in the 1970s. The state censored dissident art, yet – like many of her contemporaries, such as Santiago Bose and Pacita Abad – she refused to suppress her artistic expression. She experimented across a broad range of mediums, from print, painting, collage to installation. While many social realists of her time depicted violent, visceral protest scenes, she turned her gaze towards the overlooked amid the turmoil: women fiercely clinging to their children; women gazing out from behind their homes’ curtains, their hands in a hush position. Crucially, her activism went beyond her art: in 1987, she co-founded KASIBULAN, an artist collective that enabled women to explore creative practices beyond traditional crafts. A decade later, she co-founded Pananaw Philippine Journal of Visual Arts, the first Filipino art journal of its kind, which worked to change the market-driven Manila art world that excluded a large majority of art produced and exhibited across the country. Through her decades-long career, Cajipe Endaya remains firmly rooted in grassroots communities. She centers the stories of the most vulnerable, refusing to leave them behind in her fight for women’s rights.

Exhibition curator Eugenie Tsai has held senior curatorial positions across New York institutions, including the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. For Imelda Cajipe Endaya’s exhibition at Silverlens New York, Tsai puts forward a concise overview of the artist’s distinguished, five-decade career, while also contextualizing her practice for American audiences. Says Tsai, “Imelda’s work tracks the emergence of organized feminism in the Philippines, raising the question of how it compares to second-wave feminism in the U.S. Her belief that art offers a powerful platform from which to resist authoritarian forms of government also resonated. Her work feels unexpectedly relevant to this moment in the U.S.”

Cajipe Endaya’s interrogation of history and womanhood is especially vivid in the pieces selected for this show. Here, Cajipe Endaya draws connections among women across time and space, many of whom experienced the violence of erasure. In the painting Tutol ni Dolorosa, the pre-colonial babaylan, or priestess, is cloaked in the attire of the Virgin Mary. Cajipe Endaya evokes how Spanish colonizers imposed the Catholic ideal of a docile, silently suffering woman on Filipinos, at the cost of destroying pre-colonial culture, in which women were revered as spiritual leaders.

Other works ground audiences in today’s urgent realities. In the wall-bound assemblage The Wife is a DH, Cajipe Endaya shines a light on Filipino migrant domestic workers—many of whom endure exploitation and abuse abroad, as they strive to make a better life possible for their families back home. An open suitcase reveals the objects tied to their grueling work, such as a coconut husk used to polish floors. Yet, Cajipe Endaya also inserts the personal objects these women carry with them across the world — books, letters, a statuette of the Virgin Mary — resisting efforts to reduce their identities to their labor.

The titular work May Bukas Pa, Inay (There is Still a Tomorrow, Mother) is a massive, 17-feet-wide mixed media painting, created ten years after Marcos declared Martial Law in the Philippines in 1972. A grim landscape, featuring dazed children and ghostly, distressed women, is framed by panels of woven sawali — split bamboo matting evocative of handcrafted huts in the countryside. At the center of the piece, a woman wipes away a tear. When this work was painted, Filipinos may have felt that Marcos’ oppressive rule had no end in sight — unable to predict that a peaceful revolution would topple it four years later. And yet, the title of this work — and this show — suggests that even then, they clung to hope. 

Imelda Cajipe Endaya’s (b. 1949, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Manila) artistic career has been devoted to contemporary social issues from the viewpoint of women empowerment. In her art, she has dealt with issues such as cultural identity, human rights, migration, family, reproductive health, globalization, children’s rights, environment, and peace. Her mixed media paintings and installations are richly colored and textured with crochet, laces, textiles, window, flatiron, suitcases, papier mache craft, and found objects from home and popular culture. In 2022, Cajipe Endaya was the subject of a major retrospective staged across the Cultural Center of the Philippines and Ateneo Library of Women’s Writings, titled Pagtutol at Pag-Asa (Refusal and Hope). Other recent solo exhibitions include: Rigodon, Silverlens, Manila (2024); Abstracts (Early prints), Imagica Art Gallery, Manila (2022); and Caracol, Altro Mondo Art Space, Manila (2019).

Eugenie Tsai is a curator and writer based in New York. From 2007 – 2023, she was the John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator, Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she oversaw the Contemporary collection, and organized loan and collection exhibitions. Exhibitions she organized include Oscar yi Hou: East of Sun, West of Moon (2022-23), Guadalupe Maravilla: Tierra Blanca Joven (2022), The Slipstream: Reflection, Resilience, and Resistance in the Art of Our Time (2021-2022) and KAWS: WHAT PARTY (2021). She also co-curated Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy and Beyond (2014-15), and LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital (2013).

Prior to joining the Brooklyn Museum, she organized Robert Smithson (2004), which debuted at MOCA LA, before going on to the Dallas Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art (the exhibition received the International Art Critics first place award for best monographic show of 2005), and Robert Smithson Unearthed: Works on Paper, 1957-1973 (1991) at the Wallach Art Center, Columbia University. Eugenie worked at MoMA/PS1 as Director of Curatorial Affairs (2006-2007), and at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1994-2000) in several curatorial positions.