"Carlos Villa (1936 – 2013) was a Filipino American artist, educator, and curator. He was born in San Francisco, California to immigrant parents. Villa was trained at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1950s as an abstract expressionist. Over time he transformed his practice to address issues of ethnic and cultural diversity, and later focused on the history of Filipinos in the United States.
He was a leading figure in 'Third World' and 'multicultural' international art movements. His large-scale works reference non-Western traditions, including tattoo, scarification, ritual, and ceremony. He was also an important theorist, curator, and organizer of public forums that he called 'actions.' Villa sought to forge a new kind of art-world inclusion that reflected his own experience, commitment to diversity, and boundary-bending imagination. (Summarized from the publisher’s note.)
