Imelda Cajipe-Endaya

Imelda Cajipe-Endaya (born 16 September 1949) is a Filipino visual artist, curator, author, activist, and community leader. She is known for her printmaking, painting, mixed-media art, and installation art. She is also an author of various texts and books, as well as the co-founder of Kasibulan, an artist collective in the Philippines. She also initiated the Pananaw (Philippine Journal of Visual Arts), of which she was the first editor. Cajipe-Endaya has become a main figure Filipino feminist and national liberation movements and Philippine art. Her advocacy of women centers around Philippine history and culture.

Early life and education Cajipe-Endaya was born in Manila, Philippines. Cajipe-Endaya's work emerged from the period of ferment during the 1960s and 1970s in the Philippines. It was a period characterized by the socio-political upheaval and awakening in response to the declaration of martial law in the Philippines and as a result of the Vietnam war and a succession of economic crises. She attended the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts in Quezon City, Philippines where she earned a BA degree in advertising art in 1970, and studied art history and criticism in 1976 to 1977.

Career

In 1976, she produced a series of prints related to contemporary identity in the Philippines, which she named "Ninuno". After graduating college, she was involved mainly in the production of calligraphy and etching, influenced by artists such as Benedicto Cabrera and Ofelia Gelvezon-Tequi. In 1979, she was awarded the gold medal in printmaking from the Art Association of the Philippines in 1979. She began oil painting in 1981. Two years later, her painting, which she called "Pasyong Bayan" ("A Nation's Passion"), expressed what she calls the "people’s rage against the human-rights violations perpetrated by a dictatorial regime that resulted in the loss of our democratic freedoms".

Cajipe-Endaya had a part-time job as an archival researcher and writer while starting a family. Her print exhibition in 1979 earned her critical acclaim. In 1980, she was rated one of the best ten printmakers by a panel of critics. In 1987 she co-founded "Kasibulan", a women artists' collective, and served as its first president.

She exhibited in the Philippines and abroad, curating major exhibitions of her own, and leading innovative initiatives as an organizer, cultural worker and writer.

In the 1990s, she began working in acrylic, and received a number of awards including the special award from the Cheju Korea pre-Biennale in 1995, the Araw ng Maynila Award for Painting in 1998 and RP Centennial Honors for the Arts in 1999. From 2005 to 2009 she lived in the United States with her husband, Simplicio, an economist and project consultant.

Key themes in art practices Identity Since the beginning of her career, she has been mixing indigenous Filipino materials and forms with new forms in order to integrate her social commitment with her art practice. A large part of her work includes her use of recycled and found objects. As an archival researcher and writer, she discovered historical and religious materials such as the Doctrina Christiana, the Doctrina China, and the Boxer Codex which date back to the 16th through 19th century during which the Philippines was a colony of Spain. Cajipe-Endaya's installations are both immensely personal but also conveys perspectives that are fundamentally collective.

Hope and empowerment As well as community and struggle, Imelda Cajipe-Endaya's work also explores the themes of empowerment and hope. She moved into the student politics by her growing dissatisfaction with the Marcos regime. The collective launched empowering strategies of women, which came out of discussions with women across different professions. The NCCA was focused on creating change from the ground up, with its roots in volunteer work, with practising artists from different disciplines, and Filipino indigenous communities from northern and southern Philippines. A number of volunteers found their participation within policy-making and government running, however as cultural workers, they were maintained to the notion of being second to “hard-ball politics”.

Cajipe-Endaya worked with Paul Zafaralla, in the group's Documentation, Research and Publications sub-committee in order to formulate the Visual Arts committee project: Pananaw. It was the first Filipino art journal of its kind, as it worked to change and resist the “manila-centric, market driven, blue chip master-inflected” art making and writing found within Philippines during the time that excluded a large majority of art produced and exhibited across the country. Cajipe-Endaya negotiated with a wide range of individuals that come from different, ideological, geographically based practices to come to agreements on the creation of Pananaw. The journal series then became non-profit due to the contingency of organisational figures, and changing duties within the committee structure. The non-profit body was shaped from a purely artist-driven group into one worked with critics, managers of culture, as well as gallerists in order to create productive discourses between actors within the art world. By the second volume, Cajipe-Endaya had stepped back from the position as project director, enabling the autonomous running of Pananaw, due to the momentum of young editors, writers, and artists that allowed the intersection between different streams of meaning-making.