Carlos Villa
b. 1936, San Francisco
d. 2013, San Francisco
venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday, closed
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–5 PM
neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
This presentation of Carlos Villa’s work is representative of the artist’s longstanding explorations of multicultural identity—a sense of self grounded within a diverse community and the natural world. Villa explored his own roots as a Filipino American growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eventually expanded his interests outward to Oceanic, Latino, African, and Asian heritages. His coats and layered canvases—composed of painted psychedelic patterns overlaid with feathers and blood—merge abstraction with cross-cultural references. Old Masters (1979), a canvas that incorporates acrylic paint, feathers, and blood, and utilizes motifs drawn from Native American, Pacific Islander, and Latinx societies, brings communities into conversation with one another, while the title places the artist’s practice within both Western art historical and Pan-Asian cultural lineages. Meanwhile, the bodily fluids that grace the canvas—be it from the artist, an animal, a friend, or a stranger—work to center our lived, embodied experience. Similarly, the artist’s recurrent use of feathers and bones speaks to the sacred influences of nature on regional and personal identity formation. Villa’s work decenters whiteness, focusing on a breadth of cultural influences in a manner that is reverential to the land, ancestors, and our mutual existence.
about the artist
Carlos Villa was a multimedia and performance artist who explored the meaning of cultural diversity and multicultural issues in the arts through work in a variety of materials, including oil and acrylic paints, aluminum, steel, bronze, wood, feathers, blood, mirrors, fiber, and found objects. Villa’s performances, which he called “actions,” were an exploration of his Filipino heritage, and were woven with Asian, Oceanic, and African cultures to create a visual anthropology to represent his personal background and an expanded the definition of “multicultural” in the arts. Villa received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Mills College, Oakland, California. He served on the faculty of the San Francisco Art Institute for many years and was an influential presence in the Bay Area through his work and teaching. Villa was the recipient of many awards and grants, including a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Carlos Villa, 2021. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks