Carlos Villa: The Code
July 13 – September 6, 2025
Opening Sunday, July 13, 3–5:30pm

In his final years, legendary San Francisco artist and educator Carlos Villa created a suite of sculptural paintings that unfold like secrets. Hinged and heavy, most reveal a distinctive language carved in time: long lines roughly scratched through latex paint and wood with an awl. Other interiors are backdrops for individual canvases or grids of smaller paintings. Though equipped with cleats for wall mounting, they have no single or correct method of display. At Cushion Works, a constellation of such works are presented at various elevations and states of legibility.

The entire series appeared together only once, in a 2011 Mission Cultural Center exhibition titled Manongs, Some Doors and a Bouquet of Crates—the “bouquet” borrowed from a poem written for the occasion by Villa’s friend and colleague Bill Berkson. Like flowers, each panel opens an entire world before closing it away again.

Villa’s collective bouquet carries the weight of passage. The works evoke suitcases, packed and unpacked. They are maps tracing routes from Ilocos to San Francisco, charts and ledgers documenting literal and metaphorical movement. As architectures, they transform single spaces into multiples, obstructing familiar pathways while defining new ones. They are the oversized pages of impossible books, theatrical sets awaiting their performers (or have they just left?), props in stories still being written. They are trees playing coy with their rings.

The Code embodies both a return and a transformation. The works on view echo the geometric abstraction he explored in mid-1960s New York, where the young artist built relationships with peers like Brice Marden while maintaining what was apparently the city’s most extensive rolodex. Yet these late works also carry his growing disillusionment with Minimalism, 1969 homecoming to San Francisco, and radical turn toward incorporating unorthodox and found materials like blood, shells, mirrors, hair, and feathers.

It was the dawn of multiculturalism, and the Bay Area was a hotbed of activism from San Francisco State to Cal Berkeley to Alcatraz. “Shocked to be told that there was no Filipino art history,” as Lucy Lippard notes, “he became an aesthetic ethnographer and began to create it.” For the next several decades, Villa activated an array of transcultural, non-Western signifiers, retaining a view of connectedness free from the absolutes of authenticity and promoting the fluidity of migration. Ritual, performance, and “archivist activism” took hold, and he made the work that would define his reputation as the most celebrated Filipinx artist in America.

The Code is no simple return to form or forms. Many are nearly anti-visual in their indeterminacy, their hinges concealing slashes and scores carved not just with tools but with the accumulated reality of age, longing, indexing, commitment, and exhaustion. They are process and evidence-based, heavy in every sense—physically cumbersome to move, conceptually rich and mysterious to contend with, and emotionally dense with the tracks of a life crossing boundaries and marking new territories for art, isolation, and connectedness.

Top: Orange-A-Boom, 2010. Acrylic on wood, hardware. Two panels, 72 x 60 inches each.

Bottom: Carlos Villa Studio, ca.2011.

Special thanks to Mary Valledor, Rio Rocket Valledor, Kevin Lopez, Victor Saucedo, and Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough

Carlos Villa (b. 1936 – d. 2013) was a visual artist, activist, curator, author, and educator. His parents emigrated from the Ilocos region of the Philippines in the 1920s and he was raised in a small Filipino community in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. His father was a janitor and his mother a housekeeper. Villa attended the San Francisco Art Institute on the GI Bill and received a master’s degree at Mills College. He moved to New York in 1964, where—alongside his cousin and closest friend, the painter Leo Valledor—he rode the rising Minimal tide and exhibited widely, including at the Park Place Gallery and Poindexter Gallery.

Facing diminishingly emotional returns on abstract modes, he returned to San Francisco in 1969 and began drawing on various non-Western sources as a way to invent the Filipino American artist for which there was no model. He incorporated feathers, chicken bones, beads, and mirrors evocative of ritual ceremony, but always free of specific lineage. He exhibited widely.

In his later life, Villa returned to the language of abstraction coupled with a worldly perspective informed by a lifetime of teaching, making, and archiving. In 2022, he was posthumously the subject of the first-ever major museum retrospective dedicated to the work of a Filipino American artist, which toured from the Newark Museum of Art to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.

In addition to his studio practice, he also gathered people and communities in dialogue, and is widely known for his curatorial projects, including Other Sources: An American Essay, a multidisciplinary, multiethnic exhibition centered around women and artists of color, presented in conjunction with and as an alternative to the 1976 American Bicentennial. He also curated the “Sources of a Distinct Majority” symposia series and publication, which involved Angela Davis, bell hooks, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Juana Quick-to-See Smith, Marin Puryear, and Moira Roth, and many others, and developed the celebrated “Worlds in Collision” curricula, which he taught at many Bay Area colleges, including the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught for over 40 years.