SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Carlos Villa: Worlds in Collision, co-organized by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and the San Francisco Art Institute, invites you into artist Carlos Villa’s (1936–2013) spectacular, visually magical worlds of feathers and bones, capes and masks, tattoos and blood. The first major museum retrospective dedicated to the work of a Filipino American artist — featuring many works rarely seen before — Worlds in Collision celebrates Villa's exuberant body of work and enduring influence as a teacher, curator, and activist. Starting this June at the Asian Art Museum, with a concurrent exhibition at the nearby San Francisco Arts Commission Main Gallery (SFAC), and culminating in September at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), Worlds in Collision is an opportunity for audiences to trace Villa’s movement-spanning career. The exhibition explores Villa’s San Francisco immigrant roots, his adaptation of non-Western creative traditions, and his still-vibrant impact on the art world today.

“Carlos Villa was a legend in creative circles for his groundbreaking, ‘polycultural’ approaches, as well as the inspiration he provided to his countless students at SFAI — including household names like Obama portraitist Kehinde Wiley — yet he remains little known to many fans and scholars of modern and contemporary art. This exhibition could not be more timely, as museums across the world are diligently reexamining the narrative of art history they present,” says Dr. Jay Xu, the Barbara Bass Bakar Director and CEO of the Asian Art Museum. “We’ve expanded the Asian Art Museum precisely so we could share more contemporary art, and more kinds of contemporary art, than ever before. We’re thrilled to collaborate with so many important San Francisco arts organizations to bring Villa’s important story to new audiences and offer a unique, much-needed perspective on Asian American artistic exchange and cultural identity — to update the canon, if you will.”

“Before, I was told who I was . . .Through the practice of art, I became who I am.” —Carlos Villa

Carlos Villa: Worlds in Collision is on view from Jun. 17 to Oct. 24, 2022, at the Asian Art Museum. The exhibition spreads across two galleries and features 14 of Villa’s mostly large-scale artworks created in the 1970s and early 1980s. These eye-catching, highly textured works freely reference non-Western sources as well as Villa’s own personal history. Villa drew on African, Asian, and Oceanic art and tradition, and he incorporated unexpected materials ranging from hair, spit, and sperm to shells, feathers, mirrors, and silk. He even used his own body and face as a “brush” to impart a kind of signature.




One example, First Impressions (1980), was only recently recovered from the crawl space of the artist’s former San Francisco studio. Now in the Asian Art Museum’s collection, the unstretched canvas piece, gridded with ghostly imprints of the artist’s face adorned with tiny bone dolls, captures Villa’s lifelong exploration of his own Filipino heritage as well as his interest in organic materials and their creative coupling with major art movements of the 20th century, such as Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism.

The title Worlds in Collision is inspired by a revolutionary course that Carlos Villa taught at SFAI that aimed to decolonize art history's white, Eurocentric focus, and whose syllabus is still in use. He extended this effort beyond the classroom through public “actions” — an allusion to his interrelated practices of teaching, curating, organizing, and performing — that advocated for dissolving hierarchies between low and high art, promoting community collaboration, and centering the voices of artists of color.

The main presentation takes place in the museum’s Osher Foundation Gallery and showcases an exciting selection of Villa’s surviving constructions (many other similarly significant works were lost or destroyed by the artist himself). Villa's influence as a teacher and mentor is explored in a section of the exhibition on view in the adjacent Lee Gallery and spotlights sculpture, installation, photographs, and work by Filipino American artists that Villa mentored and taught at SFAI: Michael Arcega in collaboration with Paulo Asuncion; Paul Pfeiffer; and the trio of Eliza O. Barrios, Reanne Estrada, and Jenifer K Wofford, as collective Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. Like Villa, these artists explore overlapping issues of aesthetics, ethnography, identity, and community.

A playful highlight is TNT Traysikel by Arcega and Asuncion, a custom-made motorized tricycle-cum-roving karaoke machine. A tribute to San Francisco’s Filipino American history, the Traysikel will be activated for museum programs.

A contemporary work by Sherwin Rio and Lian Ladia on view in the museum’s Shriram Experiential Learning Center honors Villa's impact as an educator and activist on the wider community and his modeling of an expansive role for contemporary artists outside their studio walls.