salakot sweat power: family tour and workshop

Huge THANK YOU to everyone who joined us on Sunday, June 22 at @queensmuseum for a Family Day full of art, culture, and creativity! From the powerful performative tour of the Makibaka exhibit to crafting colorful, one-of-a-kind salakots, you brought the stories to life with heart, imagination, and community spirit. Your creations and presence made this day unforgettable. Let’s keep telling stories, making art, and building together.

Special thanks to @arellanopandesal for the pop-up of delicious Filipino baked goods and to @nyfacurrent and @nyculture for supporting our work and helping to bring the arts to neighborhoods across Queens! #QAF2025

monday night tales: global narratives through cinema

Queer Vistas: Sintiendo la Marea brings together a constellation of Filipinx queer films that reflect on body, desire, spirituality, myth, memory, and archives. The programme embraces queerness not as a fixed identity, but as a relational and fluid force — one that unsettles colonial, national, gendered, and cinematic boundaries. Rooted in an intersectional perspective, the selected works acknowledge the complexity of queer Filipinx experience — shaped by histories of migration, diaspora, and cultural hybridity. These films move like tides: shifting between spaces, navigating silences, and carrying the emotional textures of lives that often remain at the margins of dominant narratives.

Featuring works by Dinaly J. Tran, Maureen Catbagan, Berjer B. Capati, Joshua Serafin, and Kitty Yeung. This screening invites reflection on how experimental and poetic film can become a tool for collective memory, resistance, and re-imagining belonging. Beyond the screen, this gathering is also an opportunity to connect — to deepen exchange within the Filipinx creative community in Barcelona and to celebrate its richness through conversation and care.

Screening was on Monday, June 16, 7-10 pm at La Guacara Gallery, Barcelona in collaboration with Monday Night Tales, Ratita Films, and Nowness Asia.

"Nurse Unseen" Documentary Screening and Reception 05.18.25, 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm

Queens Museum will have a film screening of the documentary Nurse Unseen, followed by a reception. This documentary is being screened in conjunction with the exhibition Abang-guard: Makibaka.

Nurse Unseen (2023) explores the little-known history and humanity of the unsung Filipino nurses risking their lives on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic while facing a resurgence of anti-Asian hate in the streets.

The Philippines is the leading exporter of professional nurses in the world. In the United States, almost one-third of all immigrant nurses are Filipino. Since 1965, over 150,000 Filipino nurses have immigrated to the U.S. Yet, there has been little to no representation of Filipino-American nurses in U.S. mainstream media.

Furthermore, research has shown how Filipino-American nurses died at a disproportionate rate during the COVID-19 pandemic. Filipino nurses make up 4% of the registered nursing population in the United States, but at the height of the pandemic, accounted for 31.5% of the nation’s COVID nurse deaths.

On film, no one has yet told the deeper and complicated history of Filipino nursing and U.S. colonialism and its direct ties to what we are experiencing now in the age of the pandemic and the frightening resurgence of anti-Asian hatred and violence. Nurse Unseen explores why so many Filipino nurses left the Philippines to work in the U.S. healthcare system and why they have been so disproportionately affected by the pandemic.

Handle with Care Performance at 601Artspace

On the final weekend of Invisible Hands, Abang-guard (Jevijoe Vitug+Maureen Catbagan) will be performing Handle with Care with special guests Louisa Lam and AIW home care workers.  The performance will be happening on Friday, Sept 15th, 6pm at 601Artspace, 88 Eldridge Street, NYC

The artists will discuss their works featured in the exhibition, No More 24! May Day Tapestry (2023) and Care Guardian (2023), followed by a meditative participatory performance including poetry by Louisa Lam and stories from AIW home care workers. 

Louisa Lam holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry, from Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in Queens and works as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her writing and poems have been published in New York Magazine, The Greensboro Review, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art Perspective web series.

Ain’t I a Woman!? (AIW) is a campaign led by immigrant women home care workers organizing against 24-hour workdays in New York City. 

Invisible Hands is an exhibition curated by Emireth Herrera Valdés and highlights works by Abang-guard (Jevijoe Vitug+Maureen Catbagan), Margarita Cabrera, Brendan Fernandes, Jay Lynn Gomez, Zac Hacmon, Jamie Martinez, Patrick Martinez, Dulce Pinzón, Hernando Restrepo, Luis Alvaro Sahagun, and Betty Yu. Curated by Emireth Herrera Valdés. The show will be on view from July 22 - Sept 17, 2023 at 601Artspace on 88 Eldridge Street.

Abang-guard Street Museum at The Six Foot Platform

Jevijoe Vitug and I will be performing Abang-guard Street Museum at The Six Foot Platform in Dumbo, Brooklyn from 12-6 pm. The Six Foot Platform is an experimental art and performance program that presents work by Brooklyn-based artists on a 6 x6 platform at the intersection of Washington and Water Streets.

Abang-guard Street Museum is a participatory platform that enables the public to share their inner voice and creative expression via gallery format. Part workshop, part art space, Abang-guard will host and feature each piece made by the public. The platform museum provides an opportunity to showcase and uplift a diversity of voices while questioning what constitutes art and who can be an artist. Through democratic disruption, Abang-guard Street Museum empowers creativity while opening a wider field of access and authorship to the cultural production of value.

Presented by the Dumbo Improvement District in partnership with Brooklyn Arts Council.

PUSH / PULL PERFORMANCE AT AROS PUBLIC ATELIER

On September 8, Flux Factory at ARoS Public Atelier in Denmark featured PUSH / PULL, which is a collaborative project/performance dialogue between me and artists Abdul Dube, Makoto Chill Okubo, and Wren Noble. PUSH / PULL is a multimedia performance that examines the interplay between constraint and attachment, tension and dependency through different acts of tethering and marking. Through the lens of queerness and charting astronomic movements, the piece explores personal histories and interrelations between bodies. The performance was followed by a film screening of Makoto Chill Okubo’s Moippen Mama!

Artists on Artworks at The Met : Abang-guard

Thrilled that Jevijoe Vitug and I as Abang-guard will be doing a performative lecture at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We will be discussing works by four Asian American artists in the museum’s collection specifically Bumpei Usui, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Isamu Noguchi, and Martin Wong as well as creating a cross-dialogue through movement to poems by writer Louisa Lam.

Performance is Alive x Satellite Art Show - Art Basel and Miami Arts Week

Object II Body Studies, my performance and video collaborative project with artist IV Castellanos, screened at Performance is Alive x Satellite Art Show, Miami’s only Performance-Based Art Fair during Miami Art from 11/30-12/4.

Curatorial Statement: “In the wake of the pandemic, this program represents the re-emergence and reclamation of the body. The selected artists recognize the revolutionary power of the body through actions that often serve as a release from the trauma inflicted through centuries of heteronormative and colonial conditioning. In addition, this year’s program seeks work that actively rejects the systems perpetuating injustice and serves as a safe space for historically marginalized communities. This is the liberation of the body.” -Quinn Dukes

Grounding and Automatic Drawing at Governors Island

Halloween Sunday was a magical day to connect and draw with the earth.

Thank you to everyone who was part of Sympoietica, specially @sholehasgary for linking us with sonic atmosphere and @e.connolly123 for the videos and pics, @governorsisland, @flux_factory, #CityArtistCorps, @nyfacurrent, @NYCulture, @madein_ny, and @queenstheatre.

Sympoietica Performance

Join me for a grounding meditation and automatic drawing event on Saturday, October 31, from 2-3pm @governorsisland with soundscape by the amazing @sholehasgary.

Sympoietica is a participatory performance that creates a space of solace, recuperation, and creative expression through our relationship to the earth and its multi-species inhabitants. The audience is invited to participate in a guided soundscape, movement, and reflection exercise that connects them to Governors Island’s biodiversity and history while expressing their associations through automatic drawing. The performance combines the connective practice of earthing, the Surrealist technique of automatic drawing, and feminist theorist Donna Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis or "making-with.” Through sound, movement, and reflection, the performance generates a collaboration between bodies, place, and other living things that center systems of care, embodied knowledge, and collective well-being. Sympoietica is made possible by the New York Foundation for the Arts’ #CityArtistCorps Grants. Special thanks to @flux_factory, @nyfacurrent, @NYCulture, @madein_ny, and @queenstheatre.

America is in the Heart Performance for Enduring Apocalypse

On October 16, my collab project Abang-guard Duo performed “America is in the Heart” based on Carlos Bulosan’s novel for the “Enduring Apocalypse” performance marathon curated by Jenna Hamed at the Abron’s Art Center Amphitheater. Artists responded, contended with, expanded on all of the ways apocalypse befalls us, and ways to endure the ongoing man-made disasters happening to us and around us. Special thanks to @j7md and @abronsartscenter. Photo by @e.connolly123.

Artist Talk with Sholeh Asgary at Real Time & Space

I’m excited to have a conversation with artist, Sholeh Asgary as we relate our work to the multiple conceptual and cultural aspects of shadows, fog, and immaterial art. Real Time & Space will be hosting the event via Zoom on Wednesday, July 28 5-7 pm PDT / 8-10 pm EDT.

Shifting Sights/Sites - A Participatory Performance Event

The audience will be invited to participate in a guided sound, movement and reflection exercise by Abang-guard duo Maureen Catbagan and Jevijoe Vitug along with sound artist Sholeh Asgary. The performance will be followed by a lecture focusing on systems of care that re-envision the body as a dynamic, multi-layered site of interconnected trajectories and possibilities. The body becomes an entry point that touches upon themes of hidden histories, embodied knowledge, symbiotic relations, and modes of recuperation.

Note: Center for Book Arts will hold this event entirely online. A Zoom link will be sent in an email to all registrants.