First solo museum exhibit explores 'underloved,' overlooked historical narratives

My mother, who is Filipinx and Chinese, hails from Manila, Philippines, and my father is a Black man from Missouri. They met while my father was in the military. Later, they both ended up working for the U.S. Post Office, as did I for a summer. Envelopes and mail are a critical part of my formative years but also the formative years of this nation. I’ve been thinking about how Benjamin Franklin, the first U.S. postmaster, used his position to forge a U.S. identity through the dissemination of mail, roads and infrastructure, and banal nationalism such as stamps. After the Spanish American War, the U.S. expanded its empire into Guam, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Cuba and the Philippines. “Post Masters” is an excuse to think through the material and archival traces of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines through post masters. My personhood is a direct result of the overlapping arms of empire and colonialism, but also, love.

I applied to the Freund Fellowship several years ago, intrigued by the two-fold possibility of designing and teaching a new course at Washington University and a solo exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum. I developed my dream course, Artists in the Archive, and taught it when I returned to UB. Visiting the UB medical archives with Dr. Keith Mages, curator, History of Medicine Collection, spawned my interest in the glass show globes that were used to attract non-literate people to apothecaries (which precede modern day pharmacies). A residency at the Museum of Glass gave me access to an expert team of glassblowers, who manifested these giant, tiered, blown-glass apothecary vessels based on drawings I shared.

Part of my proposal for the Freund fellowship was implicating the context of the Saint Louis Art Museum, which was built as part of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition — commonly called the St. Louis World’s Fair. This world’s fair devoted the largest amount of its exhibition space to show off its recent colony: the Philippines. Over 1,200 Indigenous Filipinos were brought over and forced to construct Indigenous architecture and perform rituals in front of a hungry audience like a living zoo. Many Filipinos died from diseases transmitted through this colonial encounter in the U.S. While many Filipinos in the present-day U.S. work in the nursing or care industries, it was critical to bring in symbolism for potential healing through these apothecary vessels upon this site, whose very architecture is an inadvertent monument of this complicated exposition.

For the last several years, I’ve been framing my creative practice as one that centers the underloved or people, places, things and histories that I would like to amplify and divert more attention to. During my residency at the papermaking studio, Dieu Donné, I’ve been working with renowned papermaker Tatiana Ginsberg. I found that almost 80% of the world’s abaca is produced by the Philippines, and the industry was seized by the U.S. during colonial rule. Tatiana shared some of the raw abaca the studio had, and I was immediately attracted to it because it was unruly, but there was also this hairlike structure from the abaca being combed. I began enveloping the abaca into these abstract compositions meshed with abaca paper, manila envelopes and manila rope. Manila rope from the maritime industry was upcycled into abaca paper once the rope broke down, almost like a weathering process. But manila envelopes no longer use abaca, so the name is a specter of this colonial history. Manila envelopes were used to transmit important information, but they were never meant to be looked at. I’ve been synthesizing these iterations of the material by an enveloping process that functiona like abstract painting or archaeological displays. It’s a way of honoring this history of the courier — my mother delivered mail — and carrier.

I have some upcoming film screenings and museum exhibits elsewhere, and in Buffalo, I am finishing the preparations for an upcoming group show at Squeaky Wheel in March and a newly commissioned video projection at the historical grain silos with Just Buffalo Literary Center this summer.