Carlos Villa graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute (formerly California School of Fine Arts) in 1961 and earned an M.F.A. in painting at Mills College in 1963. While living in New York in the 1960s , He exhibited minimalist aluminum sculpture before beginning to draw and paint with the airbrush. Villa returned to San Francisco in 1969 and began a new series of abstract works based on his interest in ritualistic art from Polynesia, New Guinea, and Africa and the Philippines. He experimented with a syncretic vocabulary of forms inspired by being an American born- Filipino American in America. He has exhibited his work internationally, most notable the Whitney Annual 1972 (now Biennial) and Havana Biennial. He has also had exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Syntex Gallery, Palo Alto, CA; INTAR Gallery, New York; and the American Academy in Rome, Italy. His work is in the collections of Casa de las Americas, Havana, Cuba; Columbia University, New York; the Oakland Museum of California; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Rockefeller Travel Grant, and the SFAI Adaline Kent Award. Villa currently teaches a Materials and Techniques- Collage class and a Filipino American Art History class at University of San Francisco. For thirty-four years, He has been a professor of art at The San Francisco Art Institute, for which he has organized national symposia and conferences on Multiculturalism and art. He has served as a mentor for many Filipino American Artists. He currently serves as a Trustee on the board of the Museums of Fine Arts, San Francisco as well as the Luggage Store and 509 Cultural Center non-profit art spaces. (compilation/summary of sfai and usfca faculty biographies) Image: "Family Witnessing," 1998, Photo and text installation |