The Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) has announced the recipients of its 2024 Thirteen Artists Awards (TAA). They are Catalina Africa, Denver Garza, Russ Ligtas, Ella Mendoza, Henrielle Baltazar Pagkaliwangan, Issay Rodriguez, Luis Antonio Santos, Joshua Serafin, Jel Suarez, Tekla Tamoria, Derek Tumala,Vien Valencia, and Liv Vinluan.
With a commonality of sharing the same country with its own history and culture, each of their art practice remains as varied and differentiated as their thumbprints. Their artistic expressions encapsulate the primal force connecting their inner and outer worlds, as part of defining the self and identity. History and culture remain their solid anchors, with the natural landscape and environment shaping their own unique interpretations of the world around us.
The seven of the 13
Catalina Africa (b. 1988, Manila): Her art practice revolves on her strong sense of interconnection with the earth and the natural environment, expressed through painting, sound, sculpture, video, text, and performance. Living and working in Baler, Quezon, she notes: “I’ve discovered that by using my shape or my body or my shadow in the artworks, I feel viscerally, psychically, emotionally connected to what I’m painting or to my body on the canvas.”
A Bachelor of Arts (BFA) painting graduate from UP Diliman, Africa’s solo exhibitions include Earth Body/ Dream Portal (2023), Shrine in the Shape of Shadow (2022), and Spiralling in Starlight Vision (2022). Her first solo exhibition was titled The Etymology of Disaste in 2010.
Ella Mendoza (b.1993). A BFA painting graduate of UP Diliman, she started doing ceramics in 2015, a medium that allows her to create conceptual, sculptural, and installations works. In 2018, her first solo exhibition of ceramic works depict handmade ceramics in the form of mass-produced goods such as tin cans, plastic cups, bottles, packets, and sachets—a critique on our throwaway habit and single-use plastics that makes the Philippines one of the worst offenders of marine plastic pollution in the world.
She serves as one of the facilitators in UP’s ceramic workshop open to the public.
Henrielle Baltazar Pagkaliwangan (b. 1994): Philippine history and material culture remain the subject matters of her work expressed in prints and drawings. With meticulous attention to detail, categories and classification of objects mark her art practice, amidst an enduring fascination with the taxonomy of natural history.
A graduate of the Philippine High School for the Arts and UP Diliman College of Fine Arts, she majored in Studio Painting. Her first solo exhibit titled Tiempo Galing was held in Talisay, Negros Occidental in 2016.
Jel Suarez (b.1990, Manila): A self-taught artist, she describes herself as “collector, hunter, de-constructor, gatherer” in her art practice of collage-making that uses paper, stones, and odd-and-ends from surplus shops. A psychology graduate of the University of Santo Tomas, she was a childhood educator before becoming a fulltime visual artist.
Issay Rodriguez (b.1991): Working with drawings, cyanotypes, and virtual reality, her art practice interconnects themes of humanism and ecology. Drawing inspiration from community interactions, she explores how our own thoughts, emotions, and values can be explained or expressed through art and technology.
A BFA graduate of UP Diliman in 2013, her artist residences include Gasworks, London, U.K. (2022), Darwin Community Arts, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2017-2018), and Bella Artes Projects, Bataan, Philippines. 2017). She is a lecturer for electronic arts at UP Diliman’s studio arts department.
Tekla Tamoria /(b.1989, Metro Manila):A multimedia artist, she uses all kinds of paper such as cartolina, lottery tickets, or colored paper to create installation and wearable art. In her first solo exhibit titled Baby Girl X in 2010, she used recycled paper to create three-dimensional works and intricate paper gowns.
Nature’s infinite variety of patterns serve as her inspiration in creating geometric patterns, never-ending in their repetitions. A BFA graduate of UP Diliman, 2010, she took a course in dressmaking and started using textile and embroidery as the primary medium of her artmaking.
Liz Vinluan (b. 1987): History and its cyclical nature remains the essence of her art practice that explores death and mortality, human character and behavior, and the passage of time. As she states, art is “to make people think, to make people ponder.”
A UP Diliman fine arts graduate, her undergraduate thesis Sin Verguenzas won the best thesis award in 2009. Her work Cariño Brutal was nominated for the 2016 Ateneo art Awards; another work, Ang Cabilogan ng Isang Cuadranggulo was nominated in 2017 for the Asia Pacific Breweries-Signature Art Prize.
As one of the featured artists in Art Fair Philippfines 2019, she submitted Nung Gambalain ‘Yung Sayawan, a three-dimensional 10-meter roll of vellum paper filled with drawings and paintings that refer to the endless cycle of history.
Selection process
The CCP received 82 submissions from various art groups in the country that includes museum and gallery directors and curators, art citics, art educators, and former Thirteen Artists awardees. Phyllis Zaballero, Antipas Delotavo, Wawi Navarroza, all Thirteen Artists awardees, and CCP’s Rica Estrada Uson comprised this year’s selection committee.