Pinto Art

Name: Pinto Art
Address: New York, NY, US
Telephone: +63 917 819 2000

A temple for art and nature, the Pinto Art Museum is the home of Filipino contemporary art and shelter for artists from all walks of life.

07/13/2026

Mebuyan Pulse is built through transformation.

The installation brings together recycled and repurposed materials — 5-gallon water jugs, green fluorescent plastic bottles, laser-cut wooden panels, bamboo slats, hand-woven palm-leaf parasols, pigments, and UV-reactive finishes — composed into reflective, layered surfaces.

Discarded objects become skins.
Plastic becomes pattern.
Bamboo becomes structure.
Light becomes atmosphere.

By day, these materials create a vibrant chromatic presence across the spheres. By night, they shift into heightened fluorescence, glowing under black lights and transforming the installation into an ethereal organism.

This language of reuse connects Mebuyan Pulse to Leeroy New’s broader practice: giving materials another life, allowing objects to migrate between contexts, and turning the overlooked into forms of wonder, shelter, and collective imagination.

From waste to vessel, from fragment to world.

Support the build through the link in bio.

07/12/2026

At night, Mebuyan Pulse begins to breathe.

The installation transforms through light, sound, fluorescence, and timed activations — rhythmic gatherings that unfold as fleeting rituals in the desert.

A new 11-foot ground sphere anchors the work, clad in a laser-cut metal skin that reveals narrow slits of patterned light from within. Multicolored lasers, black lights, ground floods, pole-mounted fixtures, and sky beams create a shifting field of illumination, making the structure visible from both near and far.

Inside the spheres, cosmic and psychedelic patterns turn each pod into a distinct sensory space — for isolation, meditation, encounter, or collective experience.

Each pulse is an invitation: to pause, to attune, and to reflect on the invisible networks of care and support that move across cultures and through us all.

Mebuyan Pulse is not only seen. It is entered, felt, and shared.

Support the build through the link in bio.

07/11/2026

Mebuyan Pulse is an immersive, spherical architecture rising for Burning Man 2026.

Built by Leeroy New in collaboration with Luca Parolari it will span 23 feet high, 53 feet wide, and 31 feet deep. The installation gathers bodies, light, sound, and movement into a shared field.

Six interconnected spheres form a walkable, climbable network — an open structure for gathering, encounter, meditation, play, and shifting perspective. Suspended above the desert floor, the work appears like a drifting colony of bubbles: part organism, part architecture, part mythic vessel.

In the spirit of an Axis Mundi, Mebuyan Pulse becomes a temporary center of gravity — a living conduit between community, myth, and the natural world. It gestures toward the invisible threads that bind us—holding bodies, stories, and cultures in relation across ever-shifting social landscapes.

The work is not a fixed object. It is a spatial experience, continuously redefined by those who pass through it.

Mebuyan Pulse is coming to Black Rock City.

Support the build through the link in bio.

07/10/2026

“Ma. Buhyan Crossing the Horizon”

Mebuyan is a goddess from Bagobo mythology, rooted in the Indigenous cultures of Mindanao, Philippines. A goddess of life and death, of the afterlife and the underworld, she is traditionally imagined as a woman living beneath the earth, her body covered in breasts. She nourishes the spirits of children who have passed, guiding them through transformation — an archetype of care, protection, and renewal.

The vision for Mebuyan Pulse is to carry that spirit into Black Rock City: a nourishing, transformative, cosmic place for personal and collective growth.

Its visual language also grows from Leeroy New’s ongoing series Aliens of Manila. Playfully referencing Humans of New York, the series turns the word “alien” back on itself, reflecting on migration, service work, and the forced diaspora of Filipinos abroad — a reality sustained by labor, care, and remittances.

Everyday materials associated with work and survival — traffic cones, tubing, strainers, funnels, sponges, discarded plastics — are transformed into wearable sculptures and architectural skins.
From Manila to New York to Black Rock City, these alien forms carry gestures of reuse, migration, transformation, and belonging.

Those gestures continue through Mebuyan Vessel and now Mebuyan Pulse: objects given new lives, bodies becoming architectures, and the alien becoming a way to speak about home.

07/09/2026

“Renew, Recycle, Recreate, Restore, Reinvent, Re-appropriate, Reclaim, Rebirth, Regenerate…”

These are among the many names through which writer Agnes Miclat-Cacayan invokes the goddess Mebuyan: not only a mythic figure of the underworld, but as a force of renewal and beginning again.

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Originally designed for Burning Man 2020, Mebuyan’s Vessel received support from the Burning Man Org as a large-scale installation of twenty interconnected spheres. It was built in the Philippines with the intention of traveling to Nevada — but when Burning Man 2020 and 2021 were cancelled during the COVID pandemic, the work found another life.

It became a semi-permanent presence in San Juan, La Union, about 170 miles north of Manila, where it has welcomed thousands of visitors, from art lovers to school groups, creating a rare point of access to large-scale contemporary art outside the usual urban and institutional centers.

In parallel, Leeroy New created Mebuyan Colony at Ateneo de Manila University, a third chapter in the Mebuyan immersive installation trilogy. Built around questions of sustainable production, circular economy, material life cycles, and the repurposing of waste, the work also became home to a thriving garden that was intended to be an alternative source of food as a way to address food security in the Philippines at the time of the COVID pandemic.

From La Union to Ateneo to Black Rock City, Mebuyan continues to transform.

Address

New York, NY

Telephone

+63 917 819 2000

Website

http://www.pintoart.org/

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