Detailed Biography

"Our history as Filipino Americans," Terry Acebo Davis says, "exists as more of an oral history—we learn it through the stories of our parents, uncles, aunts and fellow kababayan. As an artist, I believe it is my duty to pass these stories on through visual language."

For years, Acebo Davis has simultaneously balanced the careers of nurse, visual artist, arts educator and activist. It is her artwork, however, that most passionately reflects her ethnic background. Her installations and works-on-paper continually evoke Filipino and Filipino-American history and culture. They are personal and political: sources range from her family's oral histories and photographic albums to materials gleaned from public archives and books.

Whether figurative or abstract, her works always allude to narratives. Her installations incorporate prints, manipulated photographs, audio recordings, as well as actual objects invested with symbolic meaning, such as field crates, thongs cast in bronze, and banig, woven sleep mats. Her prints are generally abstract and draw upon an array of printmaking processes and collage to call attention to form, color and line. Text is as important as iconography, and letters and numbers are treated as discrete design elements. The surfaces to be printed on are equally critical: a Filipino theme might be paired with Philippine handmade paper fabricated from cogon, a native grass.
Many of her works address women's issues. And her reverence for art history is reflected in visual references to such trailblazers as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. Meanwhile, her interests in medicine and art converge in numerous pieces depicting the body and its parts—anatomical references that at times enlist the tools of 20th-century technology. A foot might appear as a drawing, photograph, or x-ray.

The haunting 73, 1997, a crosslike formation of screenprints rendered in black on brown, is based on a CAT SCAN (brain x-ray or computerized axial tomography) of her father's stroke at age 73. The damaged brain tissue, roughly the size of a grapefruit, registers as hollow blank space. Acebo Davis conveys her sense of loss by filling the void with a photograph of her father in his youth.
The materials of Dahil Sa Iyo (Because of You),1995, are domestic in origin: checkered plastic tablecloth and placemats, a wooden serving set, a nightlight, crates with shoes. These are combined with lifesize multiple screenprints of her mother to pay homage to Filipina women of her mother's generation, immigrant women who held together their families and looked after the home. The reiterated figure is totemic, serving to emphasize the importance of the artist's female lineage.

(Victoria Alba, 1998)