New York’s Silverlens Bets Big with an Ambitious Group Show That’s Luring Filipino Americans

Isa Lorenzo and Rachel Rillo brought their Manila-based gallery Silverlens to New York City last September, riding out the success they had found during the pandemic. Collectors flocked to the gallery, seeking to buy works, and institutional curators reached out, looking to acquire Southeast Asian art that had long been missing from their holdings.

Once they landed in Chelsea, Lorenzo and Rillo got to work, putting together shows that would help critics, institutions, and the public understand art of the Philippines. Yee I-Lann, Martha Atienza and James Clar are among the artists who have so far received exhibitions at Silverlens in New York.

The latest show there, a group exhibition called “Shrines,” aspires toward something entirely different and even more ambitious.

“For those first five shows, we were asking questions like: Who do we think the American audience, curators, and critics know? Who do we think they would find important?” Lorenzo said in an interview. With her latest effort, she continued, the balancing act of being a liaison between two cultures went out the window. “We’re not thinking about an American audience. Here, we’re just showing you: this is what we believe in.”

“Shrines” brings together 16 artists from the Philippines and the Filipino diaspora whose work draws on the country’s tradition of ancestor worship. Some of the works on view fit into the theme neatly, such as Noberto Roldan’s 100 Altars for Roberto Chabet/NO. 26 (2014–20). The work, constructed out of architectural debris from demolished houses and other found objects, honors the memory of Roberto Chabet, considered the father of Filipino conceptual art, by harkening to the artist’s background in architecture and his conceptual interest in space through the materials he used.

Other works, like ones by Chati Coronel, fit less neatly into the theme. Her painting Asterisk (2019) is partly figurative, partly abstract, a trace of a human body done in simplifying layers of white, black, with pink and blue highlights. Many American viewers may have trouble viewing this work as the shrine or talisman is supposed to be in this show. Yet Coronel’s work is spiritual, made in a trance-like state in which she continuously simplifies a figure until it becomes void of defining racial, sexual, or age-related characteristic. Through what she calls Figurative Spatialism, Coronel lures in overlapping concepts from Buddhism and physics to represent the human figure.

As ambitious as the show is, it could seem like an odd time to mount it. Summer is when monied New Yorkers flee to their country homes, leaving galleries with the task of putting together the often disparaged “summer group show,” which is usually a low-effort bit of programming that both artists and gallerists know likely won’t sell as well as other programming. All the same, Lorenzo was committed to the timing.

“I kept telling Isa [Lorenzo], ‘This show is too good for summer, wait,’” said Katey Acquaro, director of Silverlens’s New York gallery. “She said, ‘No, no, summer is when Filipinos come here.’”

Lorenzo knows that summer is the time that Filipino and other Asian tourists come to town. She hopes that while they’re here they’ll see something that speaks to home. But more so, Lorenzo built this show for the Filipino’s who have made New York their home and who have made Silverlens an unexpected gathering place for the community.

“A lot of Filipino Americans and Asian Americans, when they come and see our shows, they feel like they belong, they feel seen,” said Lorenzo. “We didn’t know that it was so important to have this safe space.”

It was surprising to Lorenzo how many Filipinos and Filipino Americans said that they didn’t really talk about their heritage until coming into the gallery space. This even included artist Josh Kline, a friend of Lorenzo, who only recently “came out” as Filipino, she jokingly said, on the occasion of his recent show at the Whitney Museum, in which he was explicitly discussed as a Filipino American in related texts.

Knowing that they had this dedicated audience of people who not just only appreciated the space but could know the work on another level emboldened Lorenzo to prioritize a show for the community.

During last week’s opening for “Shrines,” it was clear that Lorenzo’s idea had paid off as Thursday-night gallery hoppers wove in and out of a crowd of Filipinos, taking in the art and each other.

“When we do programming, we take so many things into consideration. You’re just trying to check all the boxes of what people think will be a successful show,” said Lorenzo. “For this show, there are no boxes we’re checking. We’re just showing you who we are. If you arrived in the Philippines on any given day, any given month, any given year, this is what you would see.”