Milestones and Beginnings in Contemporary Art

Mercedes L. Vargas
Director, Lopez Museum and Library

Thank you for inviting me today to share about the Lopez Museum and Library as we celebrate our 65th year this month. It has been an honor and a privilege to steward this institution these past two decades and I couldn’t be more proud of what we have achieved, steadfast in the vision of my grandfather and father before me, while continuing to expand and deepen roots in the country and in the field.

Today I’ll be sharing some of our milestones, and for this panel, drawing focus on one of our major programs started in the late 90s: our commissioning and exhibition of Philippine contemporary art.

To give a background, the Lopez Museum and Library is a small private institution that was founded in 1960 by Eugenio Lopez Sr. out of a deep and abiding love of country. After the end of the colonial period and the complete destruction of Manila during the second world war, my grandfather felt there was a dire need for historical continuity.

With devastating losses to museums, libraries, and archives, particularly the bombing of Intramuros shown in this photograph, my grandfather with my father Oscar felt it was important to reconstruct our historical timeline. 

They began by building the library, collecting rare books, maps and manuscripts from antiquarian booksellers referencing the Philippines –the oldest of which is 500 years old, documenting Magellan’s expedition.

In an excerpt from a letter of Oscar to his father, he wrote, “Herein lies the value of a good Filipiniana library today, for it provides our intellectuals with the means not only to discover but to create a new image of the Filipino people.”

This has been a guiding spirit of the institution.

Much of the collection came together in the 1950s, beginning with colonial period rariori, and soon expanded into fine arts, especially with the assistance of my uncles Eugenio Jr.  and Roberto over the years. The collection today, which continues to serve as a Filipiniana resource, comprises pre-colonial pottery, rare books, manuscripts, maps, periodicals, photographs, ephemera, and Rizaliana. The visual art collection begins in the 1800s, with particular focus on Luna and Hidalgo, and continues through to the modern period with select acquisitions in contemporary art.

I would say our first milestone was really the collection itself – its coming together with a clear purpose and vision.

The next milestone was establishing and opening the Lopez Museum and Library to the public on February 13, 1960, at the Lancaster building in Pasay, by Manila Bay. The collections were on full display to the public in solon-style hang –and continued to grow– and personalized research assistance was offered by liscenced librarians, a service we continue to offer to this day. 

As early as then, the library also had a microfilming program. With some rariori too fragile to handle, we began microfilming library materials so that we could protect them, while still ensuring its contents and information could be used by researchers.

Over time, however, the sea air would continue to take a toll on the condition of the collection. In 1986, the Lopez Museum and Library moved to Benpes building in Ortigas in part for conservation purposes. 

At Benpres, some of our major milestones were in our expansions in conservation and visual arts.

Conservation for us started as a modest initiative, bringing in a conservator per project for first aid treatment in a small room, then became an instituted conservation program, tasked with practical and preventive conservation and restoration of the Lopez collection. As such, we specialised in paintings, works on paper, and books, and establishing requirements for climate control, storage, handling, installation, and transit. 

In the 2000s, through the generous donation of Roberto M. Lopez’s estate and the Society for the Preservation of Philippine Culture, the conservation program became the RML Conservation Center, expanding its programming to servicing other museums, institutions and collections, and, in more recent years, growing towards research and education. 

In 2022, for example, we conducted collections care modules for the Museo Kordilyera museum management training program. In 2023, we were invited to look into the UP Vargas collections and designed tailored sessions for their staff. We have also been providing MCAD with conservation services: cleaning, condition reporting and overseeing installation and deinstallation of delicate contemporary art.

In 2023, we published our first academic paper in an international journal, evaluating climate requirements for tropical collections, which we were invited to present in Spain. We have also taken an active role in international museum associations like ICOM, the international council of museums.

We have also rolled out the first iteration of our microclimate frames – technology used abroad that we have adapted locally to seal our climate control conditions. This enables us to lend more artworks, even to spaces that don’t have 24-hour air-conditioning, without risk of damage such as cracking and mold.  

In parallel to our conservation milestones, we have had major milestones in exhibitions. 

At Benpres building in the 1990s, a major pivot was transitioning from a salon-style hang, as had been done at Lancaster, where the entire collection was on display by category (Luna, Hidalgo, rare maps, etc), to curated contemporary art exhibitions that built on the permanent collection. 

In keeping with the spirit of historical continuity and shaping Philippine identity, we began inviting curators and artists to spend time with the museum and library collections, exploring areas of interest for reflection, discovery, criticality, and inspiration, lending a contemporary lens to history, with eyes towards the future. This is a program we continue to this day. 

In this exhibition 20 years ago, for example, called Grave Findings: a Reclamation Project, Maria Taniguchi connected with our 14th-15th century pottery that came from the digs in Calatagan Batangas, vigorously undertaken during the 1950s and ‘60s with support from the Lopez Museum and family. With the collection coming from burial sites and forming less than a fraction of a greater national collection found scattered in private homes and museums, the conversation that this exhibition established was not limited to the tangible earthenware objects, but, conceptually, to all the archaeological finds that have found their way to new places of repose and the journey to their present sites. 

Maria here used the pottery itself as a point of departure for her research. She studied pottery-making to understand the process, participated in an actual archaeological dig, visited the Calatagan site several times to enlighten herself of the many routes that brought the collection to the museum. She also interviewed surviving kin from the 1960s excavation team. From this she created a video work where interviewees recount the digs and lament that they have not benefited from them.  She also created several small ceramics of would-be finds of objects her interviewees wanted to be placed inside their graves, which included a wedding ring, laptop, cellphone, piano, shoes, motorcycle…  drawing attention to and questioning the role of relic, ritual, and the function of objects, including the Calatagan earthenware.

Another example is our engagement with Cian Dayrit. It started with a group exhibition in 2016 at the Lopez Museum called Exposition, that looked into ruptures in building a new world order, particularly in projects undertaken to learn more about the Philippine colony. Cian connected with our rare map collection, viewing them as intimate fragile materials on the one hand, yet historic monuments on the other that impose structures of power through political occupancy and representation, and from a God’s eye perspective.

For the exhibition, he created counter-cartographies: textile representations of our Spanish colonial maps with embroidery that overlaid another side to the story. 

We supported this practice further in 2017 through Cian’s residency for Bellas Artes Projects. Cian noticed a gap in the representation of indigenous peoples, where historic accounts in our library were from the western colonial gaze, whether they be written observations or photographs. For the residency he worked with the Aeta community of Bataan showed above, having them document their own day-to-day through photographs and mapping their unique relationship with geography, land, and nature through cartographic tapestries.

More recently, we also supported Stephanie Syjuco for her exhibition at Silverlens. As a Fil-Am part of the Philippine Diaspora, she has been preoccupied with representations of the Philippines in institutional archives in America. For her solo debut in the Philippines, she delved into the Lopez archive, taking particular interest in the Manila Chronicle Newspaper that Eugenio Lopez started in 1945 and was closed down during martial law.  

The title of her Silverlens exhibition, Inherent Vice, is a conservation term connoting inherent fault: the tendency in an object or material to deteriorate or self-destruct because of internal characteristics –a characteristic she connects to history and the nature of archives. 

Her research was pedagogic and personal, a balikbayan’s attempt to understand the nation that her mother left 50 years ago. In her Force Majeure works, she leans into the metaphor of tropical plants - isolated from the background, they recall colonial botanical illustrations - the beautiful and seemingly benign assertions of control and inventory of new imperial possessions. In her version, she overlays them with politically-charged news captions and presents them as negative images simulating a forensic investigation.

Looking forward, we plan to continue commissioning and supporting contemporary art exhibitions, lending continuity in time and space and capturing the voices of Filipinos across the islands and all over the world, including those traditionally underrepresented from the indigenous to the diaspora. 

Next year, we will be opening a new public venue at the Proscenium in Rockwell Center Makati. This will form part of a cultural space that includes a performance art theater, which we hope the community will weave into their day to day, much like catching a film in the mall or catching up with friends at a restaurant.

Apart from our exhibitions, Proscenium will host a range of activities from lectures to vintage cinema and city hops, as we’ve been doing the past couple of years in the Rockwell Area.

We will also continue to loan our permanent collection for greater access to Philippine art and heritage internationally and locally, especially outside Metro Manila where there is often less opportunity for encounters with historic works. 

At present, for example, we have works at the National Gallery of Singapore, Art Gallery of Ontario, Ayala Museum and UP Visayas Museum of Art and Cultural Heritage.

And, as my father would have wished, we will continue to enrich the library, improving on our digitization, access and delivery of materials for research and scholarship.

One aspect I would like to emphasize is that a key element at the center of our hopes and plans for the future has been our community. We have had the pleasure to work with the following institutions these past 5 years, many of whom have been working with us for decades. 

The strength of any institution lies not only in its own vision but in the power of partnerships and collaborations. By working together, we open doors to new ideas, amplify our impact, and create a lasting legacy that reflects the diverse voices and perspectives of our shared journey.

I would like to end with this quote from my father: 

“We are stewards of a legacy that we must preserve and build upon, for the benefit of future generations.”

Thank you!