Collection: Carlos Villa

Carlos Villa (1936–2013) was a San Francisco-based artist whose practice spanned painting, performance, installation and community organising, engaging with questions of Filipino-American identity, ritual, the body and the politics of representation within American art institutions. He was a central figure in the Asian American arts movement in San Francisco from the late 1960s onwards, and was instrumental in advocating for the inclusion of artists of colour within museum and gallery structures at a time when such representation was systematically excluded. Villa taught at the San Francisco Art Institute for decades and was a founding figure of the Worlds in Collision symposium in 1990, which brought together artists of colour to address institutional racism in the art world. His work is held in significant public collections. He was included in the S/O section of Know Who You Are at Every Age at the Bronx River Art Center in 2014, curated by Q_Raider and BDGRMMR — a posthumous acknowledgement, as Villa had died in 2013.