EXHIBIT: HIS ART, OUR HEART

Fruit pickers under the Mango Tree (1937)

2008 will see the coming together of the works of Fernando Amorsolo, the Philippines' first National Artist (c. 1975). Entitled His Art, Our Heart, different artworks according to genre will be exhibited in the following venues :

The Ayala Museum exhibition ‘Amorsolo’s Maidens Concealed and Revealed’ will be from Oct. 23 to March 8, 2009. It "will survey Amorsolo’s rendering of women as a means of following his career, and will draw attention to his maidens from the American period and his studies of nudes from the post-war years as a tribute to his brilliance. "

The GSIS Museum's ‘Rituals and Amorsolo’, from Oct. 2 to Dec. 20, “underlines how rituals reflect values, beliefs, and shared knowledge, how it brings about interactions among people, places and objects, how it expresses the core of social identity of communities, how it fortifies social structures and institutions, and perpetuates social values. Portrayals include baptisms, praying the Angelus, a family’s walk to Sunday mass.”

The Lopez Memorial Museum’s ‘Tell Tale: The Artist as Storyteller, Amorsolo as Co-Author’, from Sept. 24 to April 4, 2009, is illustrative of Amorsolo’s generation of artists, of how Amorsolo became subject to the workings of image-making industries central to the crafting of fictions — about what it was to be a citizen, to be learned/civilized, to be devout, to be Filipino in the transitional junctures of Spanish-American rule. Beyond looking at illustrations as potboilers, the exhibit hopes to look at how artists such as Amorsolo may have brought other layers of meaning upon texts primarily intended as didactic instruments.”

The Metropolitan Museum’s ‘Philippine Staple: The Land, the Harvest, the Maestro’ will display a harvest field of rice-related pieces and outstanding landscapes.”

At the National Museum’s ‘Master Copy’ from Sept. 25 to Jan. 15, 2009, the drawings transfigure into portraits that imagine the national self and the imperialist other, the Filipino and the American, a President like Manuel Roxas or a Gov. Gen. like Francis Burton Harrison, an elegant American lady or a nameless Katipunan revolutionary immortalized in oil after their stint in sketches.”

The Jorge B. Vargas Museum’s ‘Amorsolo: His Contemporaries and Pictures of the War, Capturing Anxieties’, from Sept. 23 to Nov. 16, will feature the works of Amorsolo and his contemporaries spanning the Second World War (1941-1945) until the immediate postwar years (1946-1947), family and official portraits commissioned by Vargas, and genre paintings. Works by peers — Manansala, Saguil, Miranda and Castañeda — will also be showcased.

The Yuchengco Museum’s ‘Mukang Tsinoy’ will be from Oct. 1 to Jan. 17, 2009. They will exhibit paintings commissioned by Tsinoy families.

Do not miss this once-in-a-lifetime art event.