Whenever I’d complain aloud to Pablo about the financial challenges of being a freelance writer, he would quiet me down by saying, in his serious baritone voice, “It’s the only good thing we know how to do.”
His sudden death in May this year left the academic and art community of Baguio bereft. Prof. Delfin L. Tolentino Jr. wasn’t just a hardworking literature teacher, he was a wit, a raconteur, an aesthete, an artist himself.Proof of this is his current, posthumous exhibition “Our Mother of Pearl” at the café of Museo Kordilyera at the University of the Philippines Baguio. The show runs until the end of the month as part of the university’s celebration of Buwan ng Wika.
From the weight and thickness of Pablo A. Tariman’s Encounters in the Arts alone and the starry names that fill the contents page and photo folio, the author has veritably compiled his life’s work. And what a compilation it is, with a knockout cover featuring international pianist and national treasure Cecile Licad and art patron Nedy Tantoco in the inset.
On extended run until Jan. 8, 2025 at the basement of the centrally located Baguio Convention Center, “Naked City: Futures from the Crossroad,” the visual arts exhibition that’s part of the recent Ibagiw Creative Festival, indeed strips from the city all those romantic, nostalgic notions and reinstates the significance of the once shunted indigenous peoples and culture.
At Friday’s Gawad CCP awards night, Jose F. Lacaba, apart from speaking truth to power, what he has done was to shake the perfumed set in the audience out of its comfortable complacency. His speech was the night’s golpe de gulat, in a manner of speaking, that for a second shushed the audience in awestruck silence before a sector broke out cheering loudly for the man.
Coming from a family of art enthusiasts, businesswoman Gianina Emille “Gia” Mendoza- Bongco of the BHF Baguio Group of Companies came up with something related to art for the family restaurant Lemon and Olives in the mountain city. She timed the event, called “Let’s Paint and Dine,” on a Sunday when droves of families, local and out-of-towners, streamed out of their rained-in shelter for lunch.
On Sept. 26, the Maningning Miclat Art Foundation Inc will hold a timely forum called “Ningning sa Dilim: Usapang Sining at Lusog-Isip” or Light in the Darkness: A Conversation on Art and Mental Health at 2 p.m. on the second floor of Arete (Ateneo Art Gallery), Ateneo de Manila University, Katipunan Ave., Quezon City.
Among the 25 prints of Fara Manuel-Nolasco on exhibit until Sept. 15 at the Darnay Demetillo Art Space of the University of the Philippines Baguio’s College of Arts and Communication is “Everlasting,” a tribute to the highland flower that traditionally serves as a welcome lei to visitors. It looks simple at first glance but upon closer look, the artist’s effort in creating the detailed layers of petals is impressive.
George Harliono, the former Indonesian-British piano prodigy who has been astonishing concert hall audiences in Europe, the US and Asia, is set to impress Manila on Aug. 23 at 7 p.m. at the Ayala Museum with a program that ranges from Beethoven’s “The Tempest” or Piano Sonata No. 17 Op. 31 to Stravinsky’s Trois Mouvements de Petrouchka.
Macli-ing’s famous words, on land ownership: “You ask if we own the land and mock us saying, “Where is your title?’ When we ask the meaning of your words, you answer with taunting arrogance, ‘Where are the documents to prove that you own the land?’ Titles? Documents? Proof of ownership? Such arrogance to say that you own the land, when you are owned by it! How can you own that which outlives you? Only the race owns the land because the race lives forever. To claim a place is the birthright of everyone. Even the lowly animals have their own place. How much more when we talk of human beings?”
