Saturday University: “What Does This All Have to Do with Coconuts & Rice?”

Welcome to Saturday University, a monthly lecture series featuring experts from around the world. Gain new insights on Asia throughout time as our visiting scholars, authors, artists, and thought leaders delve into new themes each season.

“What Does This All Have to Do with Coconuts & Rice?”: José Maceda, Arts/Cultural Institutions and Filipino Avant-Garde

Christine Bacareza Balance

Focusing on historical as well as contemporary performances of José Montserrat Maceda’s work—both in the Philippines and throughout the Filipino diaspora—this talk meditates upon the relationship between artists and arts/cultural institutions and the scales (national, local, regional, transnational, translocal) on which art making, collecting, and curation take place. Through an exploration of avant-garde aesthetics and sound/performance, it also broadly considers the questions and problems that Filipino artists, such as Maceda, pose for “Asian art.”

Maceda (1917-2004) was a musician/composer/ethnomusicologist who devoted himself to a decade of fieldwork, documenting ethnic musical traditions across the Philippines. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he brought the avant-garde and indigenous together through explorations of sound, ritual, and technology. Working through the genre and practices of conceptual art during those decades, as art historian Tina Le has noted, Maceda and his fellow “CCP artists” resisted the Marcos regime while also benefiting from its patronage.

Christine Bacareza Balance is Associate Professor of Performing & Media Arts and Asian American Studies at Cornell University, where she is also core faculty in the Southeast Asia Program (SEAP). For 2024, she serves as Thomas Tam Visiting Professor with the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Asian/Asian American Research Institute (AAARI). Balance is the author of Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America (2016), co-editor of California Dreaming: Movement and Migration in the Asian American Imaginary (2020), and currently working on a book project (tentatively titled) Making Sense of Martial Law. She has collaborated with California-based organizations such as Visual Communications (VC), KulArts, and CinemaSala on various public humanities projects, and is a member of the New York-based indie rock group, The Jack Lords Orchestra.

Tickets
$15
$10 SAM members & students with ID
Tickets include gallery access