Maia Cruz Palileo


Maia Cruz Palileo is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work consists of paintings, drawings and sculptures, and explores her Filipino-American heritage through the examination of memory, family photographs, and oral histories.

Background and education

Maia Cruz Palileo was born in 1979 in Chicago, Illinois, to parents who had emigrated from the Philippines. She received a BA in studio art at Mount Holyoke College, and an MFA from Brooklyn College. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2015. The death of Palileo's mother, in 1999, affected her profoundly. She described the event as "completely severing my connection to home, both geographically and psychologically. My naïve sense of wholeness and security was changed forever and I’ve been making work about it ever since.”

Work

Palileo is best known for her paintings. Her work has been described as a cultural and historical pastiche that has a "tropical gothic" aesthetic, a term associated with the Filipino writer Nick Joaquin. Cora Fisher of ArtForum writes that Palileo's paintings are "redolent with history but not beholden to it. The artist’s figures, emancipated from their source material, now look back at us as part of her decolonized imagination." In her exhibition "Curves of a Meandering Creek" at PioneerWorks, Palileo examined the Philippines' legacy of colonialism. The imagery for this body of work was rooted in 19th Century colonialist culture, which she researched at the Newberry Library in Chicago. The ethnographic photographs of Dean Conant Worcester, the watercolors of Damian Domingo, and a text by Isabelo de los Reyes, were all sources that she used in the work, ultimately transforming the narratives.

Exhibitions

Palileo has had solo exhibitions at Monique Meloche Gallery, Taymour Grahne Gallery, Pioneer Works, Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, and Soapbox Gallery. She has participated in group exhibitions at Yutaka Kikutake Gallery, the Rubin Museum of Art, Skylab Gallery, Alfred University, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, and the CUE Art Foundation.

Recognition

Palileo has received grants from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, and the Astraea Visual Arts Fund. She has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Lower East Side Print Shop, the Millay Colony, and the Joan Mitchell Center.