Archive - Arts & Culture

Amidst anxious times marked by the third year of the global pandemic and five weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, after a long closure, opens to the public with a group exhibition of the 2021 Thirteen Artists Awards. It runs until June 5, 2022.

The Collection of Jane Ryan and William Saunders: Jewelry in Augmented Reality by Pio Abad (b.1983, Manila) and jewelry designer Frances Wadsworth Jones is the inaugural exhibit of 21AM, the new digital museum of the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

Today, Philippine artisanal salts remain a niche product, an expensive one. And for those who actually buy it, it is considered as a chef’s delight, a gourmet pasalubong, or a foodie’s choice. Do get and enjoy some our artisanal salts, while it is still around.

The exhibit “When Salvaged Logs Bloom,” which is being held at two sites (Stall 9, Cubao X, General Romulo Ave., Cubao, Quezon City and Green Gate Gallery, Lluch Park, Palao, Iligan City) until March 6, reflects the dual face of nature and humankind: destruction and creation. It is also in parts an indictment of the violent nature of the Duterte Presidency. This fading regime has spawned extra-judicial killings (EJKs) and red-tagging during its brutal war on drugs and insurgency.

Former senator and human rights champion Jose W. Diokno, the man who “grieved for the death of the law” during the years of the Marcos dictatorship, must be grinning, wherever he is. On the occasion of Ka Pepe’s birth centenary on Feb. 26 and his 35th death anniversary on Feb. 27, the De La Salle University (DLSU), in a virtual program, renamed its College of Law into the Tañada-Diokno College of Law and the DLSU Publishing House launched his daughter Maria Socorro’s book Pamana.

Opening amidst the 36th anniversary of the EDSA People’s Power Revolution, “Mas Radikal ang Magmahal” is an online exhibit (www.radikal.ph) with more than 100 artists and artworks in a variety of medium: oil on canvas, acrylics, watercolor, wood, brass and steel, prints, assemblage, and even embroidery, as well as the use of digital technology.

Even a world-class pianist like Cecile Licad gets the blues, more so at the height of the lockdowns and quarantines resulting from COVID-19’s spread in 2020. Her home base in New York City wasn’t spared. Her live performances were cancelled.

It’s a virtual Who’s Who of the personages in contemporary Philippine visual arts. That’s the online exhibition that Gigo Alampay, founder and executive director of Center for Art, New Ventures and Sustainable Development (CANVAS), is organizing and is setting to open on Feb. 14 at this site: www.radikal.ph.

Formerly with a New York-based IT-outsourcing company, Dr. Patrick Alain Azanza came back to the country middle of last year as the 7th president of the Catanduanes State University.

A “Filipino food scientist, war hero, and humanitarian,” says Google Doodle in honoring Maria Ylagan Orosa on her 126th birth anniversary in 2019.

​ When pianist Cecile Licad interprets Chopin and Beethoven on February 22, 2022 for Manila audiences, she’ll be performing without her usual live audience.

In Sisid, t​he latest ouvre of Brillante Mendoza (first Filipino to bag the Cannes best director trophy) took notice of a man-made calamity.

It was uncanny that another super typhoon hit Visayas and Mindanao before Christmas last year.

A familiar and often taken-for-granted sight when going to the province: public schoolhouses with its symmetrical design, colonnades and arches, wide cemented steps, large capiz windows, and a flagpole in front amidst noisy children in school uniforms.

The gamut of memories on the National Artist for Literature who passed away January 6.