Imelda Cajipe Endaya’s historic recognition opens a larger question about who gets to become an artist—and whose art becomes part of a nation’s story.
“Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In 1971, the American art historian Linda Nochlin asked that deliberately provocative question. A year later, on the other side of the world, the Philippines established the Order of the National Artists, its highest national recognition for Filipinos who’ve made significant contributions to the development of the country’s art. Since then, some of the most important names in Philippine visual cultureCultureshared traditions, beliefs, values, customs, arts, and social practices that define the identity and way of life of a community, society, or nation.Go to Culture Glossary have been counted among its ranks, beginning with Fernando Amorsolo in 1972. More than half a century later, these two histories arrive at an interesting intersection as Imelda Cajipe Endaya becomes the first woman to be proclaimed National Artist for Visual Arts.
It’s an important recognition of both Cajipe Endaya’s body of work and the place she now occupies in the country’s cultural history. But there’s something in that “first” that inevitably invites another question: Why Have There Been No Women National Artists For Visual Arts (Until Now)?
There were, and are, of course, significant Filipina artists. We could answer the question by naming them. But that isn’t the point. Not really. It’s sort of like a matryoshka. The familiar Russian nesting doll first presents itself as a woman, its form traditionally evoking motherhood and generations of women contained within one another. But it’s the structure of the object that interests me. Open one figure, and another appears. Open that, and there’s still another. The question works much the same way. Ask why no woman had yet been recognized as a National Artist for Visual Arts, and another question is found inside: who had the opportunity to become an artist in the first place?
A Philippines Without Women National Artists
Once upon a time, long before a woman could become a National Artist, even entering an art school constituted a first.
In 1899, at the age of 22, Pelagia Mendoza y Gotianquin became the first woman admitted to Manila’s Escuela de Dibujo y Pintura, which had only accepted male students since its establishment in 1820. While still studying sculpture, she won first prize in a government competition for a wax bust of Christopher Columbus. Her appearance on the cover of La Ilustración Filipina may also have marked the first time a woman visual artist was written about in a Philippine periodical.
Today, those distinctions might read as interesting footnotes, but again the word “first” tells us something more than the artist herself.
Talent requires somewhere to go.
This was part of Nochlin’s argument. Writing about artistic education in the West, she points to the nude model. For centuries, its study was considered essential training for ambitious history paintings upon which reputations were built, yet women were largely denied access. The question was never simply whether women possessed talent, but whether they had access to the conditions through which talent could develop.
Mendoza crossed that first threshold. But even the early account of her success suggested an artist still developing, the La Ilustración Filipina writer observing that the piece “lack[ed] a greatness” as “she still has not conquered the deeper secrets of her art.” She married her fellow student Crispulo Zamora in 1892, and accounts of her life suggest that marriage and domestic responsibilities affected the further development of her individual artistic career. None of her known works are believed to have survived.
An artist needs instruction and materials, but also time to work and the circumstances that allow an artistic practice to become an artistic life.
By the 20th century, women were increasingly entering institutions once closed to them. Anita Magsaysay-Ho studied at the University of the Philippines School of Fine Arts, whose history can be traced back to the same art school Mendoza entered in 1889. There, Magsaysay-Ho trained under Fernando Amorsolo and became the sole woman among the Thirteen Moderns. Among the men associated with that generation were Victorio Edades, Carlos “Botong” Francisco, Vicente Manansala, H.R. Ocampo, and Cesar Legaspi, all of whom would become National Artists.
The door to the academy had opened. Beyond it, however, was the rest of a woman’s life.
Magsaysay-Ho continued to have a significant artistic career, but the conditions under which she made art were also shaped by her life as a wife. In her 2015 paper, “Towards a Herstory of Filipino Women’s Visual Arts,” Cajipe Endaya recounts that Magsaysay-Ho painted while her husband was at work, putting everything away before he returned. According to that account, he never saw his wife paint and was surprised at how she could hold art exhibits.
Marriage would shape another kind of belonging, too.
Writing upon Magsaysay-Ho’s death in 2012, Sonia Ner, who had edited a book on the artist and interviewed her extensively, noted the irony that an artist whose work remained so closely tied to the Philippines had yet to receive its highest artist honor. After marrying Robert Ho, a Chinese national, Magsaysay-Ho lost her Philippine citizenship.
That same year, a Senate resolution sought the country’s highest recognition for her contribution to Philippine cultural heritage. At the time of her passing, she was a Canadian citizen, and the resolution noted reports that her citizenship prevented her from inclusion in the Order of National Artists.
There’s nothing inherently unreasonable about citizenship being a requirement for an honor called National Artist. But Magsaysay-Ho’s story reveals that even the question of who could remain Filipino once operated differently for women.
And still, there’s another assumption buried inside our original question: that we already agree on what an artist makes.
What Do We Call Art?
After all, women have always been making things. But whether history has called all of it art is another matter.
In her attempt to trace a history of Filipino women’s visual arts, Cajipe Endaya looks beyond the academy and individual artists whose names have survived it. She includes the largely anonymous women who sewed and embroidered, wove textiles, made jewelry, dressed religious images, cut intricate designs into pastillas wrappers, and produced other forms of functional and ritual art.
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The distinction between “fine art” and “craft” has historically placed painting and sculpture on one side, and many forms of making associated with utility, domesticity, and women’s work on the other. The distinction matters because it changes the question. It’s no longer only about whether women had the opportunity to make the kinds of art that institutions value, but whether the things women were already making were valued as art in the first place.
Established in 1987 by Cajipe Endaya with Branda Fajardo, Anna Fer, Julie Lluch, and Sister Ida Bugayong, KASIBULAN created a space for women artists at a time when many were working with few opportunities to exhibit. But the collective’s ambitions went beyond making room for women within an existing art world. They also questioned the boundaries that the art world had inherited, including the hierarchy between fine art and indigenous or folk craft.
Cajipe Endaya collapses those boundaries in her own work. When art materials became expensive, she began looking around her home. Sawali and nipa from her bahay kubo, her husband’s denim jackets, her lola‘s shawl, and her own childhood clothes found their way into mixed-media works and installations. Crochet could sit beside paint, woven bamboo could become a surface for collage, and an object from the home could enter the gallery.
Materials that might have been dismissed as domestic or decorative didn’t have to be left behind for her to be considered an artist. She brought them with her and unsettled the distinction. But deciding what we call art is not quite the same as deciding what we call “great art.” Art history does more than draw boundaries around what belongs within it. It creates hierarchies within those boundaries. Certain works become exemplary; certain artists become canonical; and a select few come to stand for an entire period, movement, or even nation.
What Makes Art National?
If a work of art stands for a nation, few Philippine paintings have carried that weight like Juan Luna’s “Spoliarium.”
The monumental painting won a gold medal at Madrid’s Exposición Nacional de Bellas Artes in 1884. The Philippines was still a Spanish colony, and the triumph of Luna and fellow artist Félix Resurrección Hidalgo quickly acquired political meaning. At a banquet held in their honor, their success was celebrated as evidence of what Filipinos could achieve when given opportunities to train and develop talent.
The meaning attached to “Spoliarium” has endured. Today, it hangs in the National Museum of Fine Arts in a hall that bears its name.
It’s this position in Philippine art history that Cajipe Endaya takes up in her 2004 series, Conversations on Spoliarium and Women’s Work.
Across four collages, she places reproductions of Luna’s painting in dialogue with the visual languages of Paz Paterno, Pacita Abad, Agnes Arellano, and Alma Quinto. Cajipe Endaya described the series as a discourse between male art, conventionally regarded as a masterpiece, and the art and craft of women that had remained largely invisible in art history.
“Spoliarium” remains visible throughout the series, but it now shares the frame. A painting whose early significance was bound up in challenging assumptions about who could produce great art becomes, in Cajipe Endaya’s hands, a way of asking whose art gets to enter the history of greatness. And when that history becomes national, the stakes become higher.
Among the criteria for the Order of National Artists is an artist’s contribution, through the content and form of their work, to building a Filipino “sense of nationhood.” Greatness, in this context, is therefore not only a question of artistic achievement, but also about the place a body of work comes to occupy in how a nation sees itself.
But every artist sees from somewhere.
For Cajipe Endaya, the way of seeing the Philippines, as expressed in her body of work, has often included experiences historically associated with women. She explores themes of home and domestic labor, migration and the export of Filipina workers, political participation, and histories of violence. These are not incidental questions of nationhood; they expand the experiences through which the nation can be seen.
This doesn’t mean that a woman artist must make art about women, or that her significance must depend upon representing some universal experience of womanhood. To demand that would simply replace one set of expectations with another. Cajipe Endaya herself has resisted such limitation. Even as she engaged explicitly with feminism, she wrote that her first concern as an artist was to continue exploring new forms, materials, and ways of seeing.
Continuing The Questions On Women National Artists
In 2015, Cajipe Endaya wrote, “Towards a Herstory of Filipino Women’s Visual Arts.” In its conclusion, she returned to the same question that my own reflection begins with: Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”
Cajipe Endaya understood, as Nochlin had, that the question couldn’t be answered simply by producing a list of great names. Conversations on the Spoliarium and Women’s Work does give us some of those names, but the deeper question is how greatness becomes visible in the first place. To understand the relative invisibility of women in art history, Cajipe Endaya argues, requires looking at the institutional structures of the art market and art history itself.
The first woman to be proclaimed a National Artist for Visual Arts enters a canon whose boundaries she has spent much of her career questioning. The significance of that “first” is not that it finally answers the question with which we began. Rather, it gives us reason to keep opening it.
Feature photo: “Tutol ni Dolorosa” (1991) by Imelda Cajipe Endaya. Banner photo: “May Bukas Pa, Inay (There is Still a Tomorrow)” (1982) by Imelda Cajipe Endaya
Photos courtesy of Silverlens
Frequently Asked Questions
Imelda Cajipe Endaya is the first woman to be proclaimed National Artist for Visual Arts in the Philippines. Her recognition is significant both for her body of work and for the place she now occupies in the country’s cultural history.
The absence of women National Artists for Visual Arts raises larger questions about who had the opportunity to become an artist, whose work was valued as art, and whose art entered the history of greatness. Women artists historically faced barriers to artistic education, time, materials, exhibition opportunities, and even citizenship, while forms of making associated with domesticity and women’s work were often categorized as craft rather than fine art.
There were significant Filipina artists long before Imelda Cajipe Endaya became the first woman National Artist for Visual Arts. Anita Magsaysay-Ho, for example, trained at the University of the Philippines School of Fine Arts and became the sole woman among the Thirteen Moderns. Other women artists and makers also contributed to Philippine visual culture through painting, sculpture, weaving, embroidery, jewelry, religious imagery, and other forms of functional and ritual art.
Imelda Cajipe Endaya is known for a body of work that explores themes including home and domestic labor, migration and the export of Filipina workers, political participation, and histories of violence. Her practice also challenges the distinction between fine art and craft, incorporating materials such as sawali, nipa, denim, shawls, childhood clothes, crochet, and woven bamboo into mixed-media works and installations.
Imelda Cajipe Endaya’s recognition gives greater visibility to questions she has spent much of her career exploring, including who gets to enter the history of artistic greatness and what is considered art in the first place. As the first woman to be proclaimed a National Artist for Visual Arts, she enters a canon whose boundaries she has also questioned, giving reason to continue examining how art history, the art market, and national recognition determine whose work becomes part of the country’s story.
