23/09/2026
Our museum curator Tessa Maria Guazon writes about National Artist Imelda Cajipe Endaya’s lifework and artistic practice:
National Artist for the Visual Arts Imelda Cajipe Endaya, the first woman to be conferred the title, is a feminist and a staunch advocate for women’s rights. Her most significant contribution to Philippine art and culture is an artistic practice embedded not only in the feminine—a body at once personal, immediate, and corporeal—but also entwined with the body politic—a collective self brought together through a shared social experience. Imelda Cajipe Endaya began her artistic career as a printmaker, with works using archival images, old prints, drawings, and photographs. Her interest in national identity explored the unease embedded in encounters between indigenous and colonial cultures.
Art critic Alice Guillermo wrote of her very first paintings from an exhibition at the City Gallery in 1981, noting a keen and astute grasp of social change, embodied by a sense of history, and a strong commitment to the plight of Filipino women. Her works, which encompass a range of forms, are characterized by her unconventional reconfiguration of pictorial space and by her incorporation of materials and processes originating in domesticities and women’s craft. These attributes remain evident in her art, a practice that is generative but firmly grounded in its local world.
Many women’s groups emerged after 1986, with the downfall of the Marcos dictatorship and the People Power Revolution, including the Katipunan ng mga Kababaihan para sa Kalayaan (Organization of Women for Freedom or Kalayaan) and the Kababaihan sa Sining at Bagong Sibol na Kamalayan (Women in Art and Emerging Consciousness or KASIBULAN), which she established with fellow women artists Brenda Fajardo, Anna Fer, Ida Bugayong, and Julie Lluch, one of the longest thriving organizations of feminist artists in the Philippines.
Imelda Cajipe-Endaya shared her sharp observations on the state of Philippine contemporary art from the late 1990s to the early 2000s in articles she wrote for local and international publications, as well as in keynote lectures and remarks at exhibitions and gatherings. She highlighted the efforts of artists in the Philippine regions and their collective work toward those ends. More tellingly, she defines feminism in a 2000 museum lecture in Hong Kong: “a dynamic practice and theory, and the feminist as someone who recognizes that women are a marginalized force in society, but is determined to rectify this through her life and work.” These are the continuing legacies of woman artist Imelda Cajipe Endaya, championing a feminist practice grounded in the collective imagination, actively engaging a local, moral world.
The UP Vargas Museum hosted ‘Traces,’ her solo exhibition in 2010, that centered on the theme of women, war and peace. Her series of lithographs, chine colle, and monoprints were in dialogue with archival materials and artworks from the Vargas Museum collection by fellow Filipina artists. Images conveying peace are interspersed with photographs of military weapons and toys resisting war. The latter alludes to the Philippine experience in the Second World War, the wars in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Words, textile, and video installations complement the works. In this exhibition, Imelda Cajipe Endaya’s sentiments on women also intersect with the memory of the lives of Marina Yulo and Nena Vargas. The former was the first wife of Jorge B. Vargas, and the latter, his eldest daughter.
“I like my work to reflect the Filipino-Asian-Pacific woman-wife, mother, sister, daughter-gaining mobility, and fulfillment for herself as she strives to live meaningfully for others.” Imelda Cajipe Endaya, Stitching Paint into Collage, 2009.
About Imelda Cajipe Endaya
Multidisciplinary artist Imelda Cajipe Endaya was born on September 16, 1949. She received a degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Philippines Diliman in 1970. Her numerous recognitions as an artist include the Ani ng Dangal from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts in 2009, the Centennial Honors for the Arts from the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1999, the Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan from the City of Manila in 1998, Ateneo Library of Women’s Writings Honors for Women in the Arts in 2008, the Irwin and Florence Slow Memorial Art Award from the American Society for Contemporary Art in New York in the same year, the College of the Holy Spirit Centennial Award in 2013, and the Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1990. Her works are represented in collections here and overseas, including the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the National Museum of the Philippines, the Metropolitan Museum of the Philippines, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the National Gallery Singapore, the Okinawa Art Museum, and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan.
