REAL PEOPLE/GOING BIG TO HIT HOME
I Am Unstoppable
Muralist Eliseo Silva celebrates the culture of his native Philippines
Silva’s mural in Historic Filipinotown, Los Angeles, depicts Filipino American heroes including labor leader Philip Vera Cruz.
WHEN I FIRST came to the U.S. from the Philippines in the 1990s, the other art students would tell me that there’s no such thing as Filipino art. That it’s not part of the Western canon. This became a challenge for me. If Filipino art isn’t recognized, then we as a people can’t tell our stories.
The Philippine nation defeated Spain in 1898 to gain its independence, and the original Philippine flag featured a sun with a human face on it, representing the face of God. But then the United States took control of the country and removed that human face, symbolically erasing our humanity and national identity.
One of the first things I did when I started painting murals was to put that face back on the Filipino sun. I also used my murals to honor unsung Filipino and Filipino American heroes. I love murals because they’re big and bright and they’re open for everyone to see. I’ve painted probably a hundred of them—many in Los Angeles, but also in Alaska, Seattle, Philadelphia. I recently finished a new 30-foot-tall gateway arch in Historic Filipinotown in L.A. The name of the piece is Our Guiding Star, and it bears images that appear in precolonial Filipino aesthetics. There’s a gumamela, or hibiscus flower, which was culled from Babalyan healers’ tattoo motifs, and the Sarimanok, which guides travelers at sea on their journey home.
I was traumatized when my peers at art school discouraged me from focusing on Filipino art. But thanks in part to them, there is much more art honoring Filipino culture in the U.S. When somebody tells you that you can’t do something, it makes you want to do it even more. It makes you unstoppable. Now if someone were to say to me, “What’s Filipino art?” I’d have a lifetime of work to show them. —As told to David Hochman
Eliseo Silva, 52, is an author, teacher, designer and multimedia artist based in Los Angeles.