Month: February 2026
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Isabelo de los Reyes’s Las Islas Visayas
Isabelo de los Reyes was born on July 7, 1864 in Vigan, Ilocos Sur, the son of the Ilocana poet Leona Florentino. He was raised for a time under the care of his uncle, a lawyer and member of Ilocos’ literary circle. At sixteen, without his uncle’s consent, he left for Manila. He studied at…
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EXPOLIARIVM: The Expatriate life of Juan Luna’s famous painting
In 1884, at the Madrid Exposición General de Bellas Artes, a photograph by Juan Laurent captured Juan Luna’s Spoliarium installed alongside other works exhibited within a cavernous steel and glass hall. The image preserves the exhibitionary context that contributed to consolidating the painting’s public and international reputation. While scanning the Biblioteca Nacional de España’s archive,…
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Vicente Rafael, Historian, 70
Vicente L. Rafael (February 16, 1956 – February 21, 2026) was a pioneering historian of the Philippines whose work transformed the study of colonialism and political power. A longtime professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington, Rafael reshaped Philippine historiography by demonstrating how empire operates through language and the fraught…
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Bonifacio’s Talisman
Andrés Bonifacio (1863–1897) was a Filipino revolutionary leader and founder of the Katipunan, the secret society that launched the 1896 uprising against Spanish colonial rule. Often called the “Father of the Philippine Revolution,” Bonifacio emerged from modest urban circumstances in Tondo, Manila, and rose to prominence through his ability to mobilise working-class supporters. Unlike later…
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Manila Beans in a Medici Recipe Book
When I visited Florence over the summer, I was surprised by how many Filipinos I met. Some were priests. Others ran restaurants or worked as artists. Hearing Tagalog in Tuscan streets made me think about older connections between Manila and Europe. I began wondering how Manila was imagined by the rest of the world during…
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Museum installation focuses on small figures in large landscapes
I wrote about staffage in vues d’optique—a genre of etching popular in the second half of the eighteenth century—for a new exhibition at the Johnson Museum. I first encountered these prints during my research fellowship in Leiden and was struck to learn that, around the same time, the Johnson received a donation of a set…
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The Chapel in the Six Circuits of Hell
In his Kapilya installation for Art Fair Philippines, Max Balatbat assembles a makeshift chapel of salvaged wood and rusted rebar. This is supposed to represent the look of faith forged from marginal lives that the art writer Carla Gamalinda has compared to the one studied by Rey Ileto’s Pasyon at Revolution. A pendulum whip swings…
Geronimo Cristobal 