USC Pacific Asia Museum

46 North Los Robles Avenue
Pasadena, California 91101
Open Wednesday through Sunday 10am to 6pm

EXHIBITION

Fashioning Domesticity, Weaving Desire: Visions of the Filipina

October 14, 2024 – February 8, 2025
In the Focus Gallery
Guest Curators: Pearlie Rose Baluyut and Agnes Bertiz

View the Exhibition Brochure [PDF:2MB]

(Dis)Embodied Filipina, 2009 by Nicholas Caesar Colon
1898 Keystone stereocard reproduction with digital prints

“Fashioning Domesticity, Weaving Desire: Visions of the Filipina" exhibition explores the canonical visions of the early to mid 20th-century Filipina as civilized and/or wild. Through the juxtaposition of traditional textiles and ethnographic photography, as well as objects of personal adornment and popular print culture, this exhibition addresses the fashioning of domesticity and the weaving of desire as political strategies of polarization. Interrogating the body as a (dis)embodied landscape activated by the braided contexts of colonialism and democracy, the exhibition acknowledges that central to this binary of conquest and governance is the co-existence, reflection, and collision of the “modern” and “primitive.”

Sponsored by The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Los Angeles County Arts Commission.