Imelda Cajipe Endaya’s upcoming exhibition at Silverlens New York paints a picture of the various roles played by Filipino women throughout history’s most tumultuous periods.
Pioneering feminist artist Imelda Cajipe Endaya is holding her first U.S. solo exhibition in almost two decades on May 8, 2025 at Silverlens New York. Titled There is Still a Tomorrow, Mother and curated by Eugenie Tsai, the show features Cajipe Endaya’s works spanning from 1982 to 2023. The collection captures what the artist has focused on for nearly half a century: the role of Filipino women through the arc of history.
The stories of Filipino women have long been neglected amid colonialism, war, and dictatorship—something Cajipe Endaya has worked to rectify, not only by depicting their plights, but also incorporating the very materials touched by their lives and labor. These include cloth gloves, woven bamboo ,and crocheted textile, which all work to assert the Filipina’s craft as a form of resistance. Her works, while rooted in the Philippines, urgently remind everyone of the creative power of the marginalized, especially amid state suppression.
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Art As Activism
Cajipe Endaya emerged as an artist as the Philippines slipped under the shadow of Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorial regime in the 1970s. The state censored dissident art, yet like many of her contemporaries—such as Santiago Bose and Pacita Abad—she refused to suppress her artistic expression. She experimented across a broad range of mediums, from print and painting to collage and installation.
While many social realists of her time depicted violent, visceral protest scenes, Cajipe Endaya turned her gaze towards the overlooked amid the turmoil: women fiercely clinging to their children, or gazing out from behind their homes’s curtains, their hands in a hush position.
Crucially, her activism went beyond her art: in 1987, she co-founded KASIBULAN, an artist collective that enabled women to explore creative practices beyond traditional crafts. A decade later, she co-founded Pananaw Philippine Journal of Visual Arts, the first Filipino art journal of its kind, which worked to change the market-driven Manila art world that excluded a large majority of art produced and exhibited across the country. Even today, Cajipe Endaya continues to work with grassroots communities, centering the stories of the most vulnerable and refusing to leave them behind in her fight for women’s rights.
There is Still a Tomorrow, Mother by Imelda Cajipe Endaya
The artist’s interrogation of history and womanhood is especially vivid in the pieces selected for There is Still a Tomorrow, Mother. Here, she draws connections among women across time and space, many of whom experienced the violence of erasure.
In the painting “Tutol ni Dolorosa,” the pre-colonial babaylan, or priestess, is cloaked in the attire of the Virgin Mary—a reference to Spanish colonizers imposing the Catholic ideal of a docile, silently suffering woman, and the destruction of pre-colonial culture that follows this kind of erasure.
Other works ground audiences in today’s urgent realities. In the wall-bound assemblage “The Wife is a DH,” Cajipe Endaya shines a light on Filipino migrant domestic workers, many of whom endure exploitation and abuse abroad as they strive to make a better life possible for their families back home. An open suitcase reveals the objects tied to their grueling work, such as a coconut husk used to polish floors. Yet the artist also inserts the personal objects these women carry with them across the world—books, letters, a statuette of the Virgin Mary—resisting efforts to reduce their identities to their labor.
The titular work “May Bukas Pa, Inay” (“There is Still a Tomorrow, Mother”) is a massive, 17-feet-wide mixed media painting, created ten years after Marcos declared Martial Law in the Philippines in 1972. A grim landscape features dazed children and ghostly, distressed women, and is framed by panels of woven sawali—split bamboo matting evocative of handcrafted huts in the countryside. At the center of the piece, a woman wipes away a tear.
When this work was painted, Filipinos may have felt that Marcos’s oppressive rule had no end in sight—unable to predict that a peaceful revolution would topple it four years later. And yet, the title of this work and its eponymous show suggests that even then, they clung to hope.
“Imelda’s work tracks the emergence of organized feminism in the Philippines, raising the question of how it compares to second-wave feminism in the U.S.,” explains Tsai in a statement. “Her belief that art offers a powerful platform from which to resist authoritarian forms of government also resonated. Her work feels unexpectedly relevant to this moment in the U.S.”
Poklong Anading: Deep In The Shallows, Afloat In The Depths
Accompanying Cajipe Endaya’s There is Still a Tomorrow, Mother at the Silverlens New York Viewing Room are the works of conceptualist Poklong Anading. Titled “deep in the shallows, afloat in the depths” (“lumalalim sa kababawan, lumulutang sa kalaliman”), the show marks the artist’s first U.S. solo exhibition, and features a new sculpture and video installation that reflects on humanity’s impact on marine ecosystems, as well as the possibilities of both damage and renewal.
Titled “recruit (no. 2),” the piece on view at Silverlens New York centers on found ghost nets recovered by Anading and a team of Davao Gulf Divers, led by Master Diver Iñigo Taojo. The artist reimagines the net into a monumental sculpture installed in the heart of the gallery. Reshaped to resemble coral, these once-destructive objects become symbols of regeneration.
In this gesture, Anading pointedly echoes Marshall McLuhan’s concept that “the medium is the message”: the nets retain the memory of their past harm while embodying the resilience of marine life they once imperiled. A video component behind the sculpture documents reef rehabilitation efforts and honors the divers who aided in the net retrieval, underscoring the power of collective action, especially in regard to ecological restoration and conservation.
“IMELDA CAJIPE ENDAYA: There is Still a Tomorrow, Mother” and “deep in the shallows, afloat in the depths (lumalalim sa kababawan, lumulutang sa kalaliman)” will both be on view at Silverlens New York from May 8 to June 21, 2025.
Photos courtesy of Silverlens Galleries.
