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Abang-guard: Museum of Little Manilas
July 26 @ 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Abang-guard: Museum of Little Manilas
Conversation and Workshop
26 July 2024, Friday, 2:00 – 4:00 PM
3/F North Wing, UP Vargas Museum
Register to join, bit.ly/UPVMAbangGuardJuly2024.
The UP Vargas Museum invites everyone to the conversation and workshop, Abang-guard: Museum of Little Manilas with artists Maureen Catbagan and Jevijoe Vitug on 26 July (Friday), from 2:00 – 4:00 PM. The conversation and workshop are open to the public, with limited seats and slots.
Abang-guard will present “Museum of Little Manilas,” a series of projects that combines multi-media installations, performance, and social practice, alongside previous works. The project focuses on transnational place-making to commemorate and reflect on the overlooked histories of the diaspora of Filipino labor.
Following this discussion, there will be a workshop to pay tribute to Nena Saguil, a Filipina artist who worked various odd jobs to pursue her artistic practice in Paris, France in the late 1950s. Inspired by Saguil’s 1954 relief print work “Tag-Ani sa Bukid” from the Jorge B. Vargas Museum permanent art collection, the workshop will explore gestures and movements associated with labor, harvest, and aspiration.
For inquiries, email us at [email protected].
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About the project
Abang-guard is a collaboration between artists Maureen Catbagan and Jevijoe Vitug. It explores immigration, labor, and visibility. Reflecting on the artistic strategies of the avant-garde, Catbagan and Vitug reframe personal history and artistic practice with intimacy, critique, and humor to convey the complexities and nuances between cultural production, institutional structures, and the deployment of labor. The collaborative project began in 2017 when they served as museum guards. Recent performances of Abang-guard were at the DUMBO Arts in 2023, for the exhibitions “Invisible Hands” at 601 Artspace and “and in pieces…” at PS122 Gallery both in 2023 and at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Governors Island in New York both in 2022.
They received the 2024-2025 QM-Jerome Foundation for Emerging Artists for their upcoming exhibition at the Queens Museum in New York in Spring 2025.
Catbagan has an MFA from the City University of New York and Vitug has an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Source: UP Vargas Museum Facebook