Carlos Villa: (not) Sorry
I. ENTER THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE
When visitors to the 2019 Singapore Biennale stepped through the doorway of Gallery A at the National Gallery Singapore, they immediately encountered a portal of another sort. A felt trilby hat was propped on a metal stand, flanked by two rows of black feather-covered door panels that appeared to recede into the distance toward a bronze tag inscribed “DESIRE.” Above the gateway floats the word “ORIENT.” Titled My Father Walking Up Kearny Street for the First Time (1993) this sculpture by Carlos Villa references his Filipino father’s arrival in San Francisco in the 1920s, and symbolizes the initial steps of someone embarking on a journey into the diaspora in order to pursue their hopes and dreams for a better future. Admission into the land of opportunity comes with a price, the work suggests. Protruding perpendicularly from the work’s left and right edges, so that they are hidden at first, are two vertical boards bearing the words “Silence” and “Self Loathe.”
The driving inspiration behind the 2019 Singapore Biennale, “Every Step In the Right Direction,” was the need and opportunity to offer a broadly conceived notion of change. It homed in on the gestures of artists who express awareness of what is not right with the world and who put forward solutions. Villa’s life and work represent this undertaking. In both his practices as a teacher and prolific artist, he attempted to not only render the migrant experience visible but also to reconcile cultural differences. He maintained a sense of optimism throughout his work as he strived to foster the conditions for a multicultural, cosmopolitan society. His perseverance ultimately created a legacy that ignited a discussion on diversity and inclusion in the arts in California.
Villa was born in 1936 in San Francisco to parents who had moved to the United States from the farming
