Terry Acebo Davis


Terry Acebo Davis is a Filipino American artist and nurse. Her art is thematically linked to her family and her origins as a Filipino American.
She has served as Chairwoman of the Palo Alto Public Art Commission, lectured at the Smithsonian and Mills College, and received multiple awards and fellowships for her art. In 2004 she became the first Filipino American to exhibit art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco's Samsung Hall.

Early life and education

Born in Oakland, California, the oldest of six children, Acebo Davis gained a Bachelor of Science from California State University, Hayward in 1976, followed by graduate coursework in nursing at the University of California, San Francisco. In 1991 she was awarded a Bachelor of Fine Arts by San Jose State University, followed by an MFA in 1993.

Career

In 1997 she was awarded the James D. Phelan Award by Kala Institute, along with the Radius Award of the Palo Alto Cultural Centre. The same year, she participated in the exhibition Families: Rebuilding, Recreating, Reinventing hosted by Flo Oy Wong at the Euphrat Museum of Art.
In 1998, Acebo Davis began a residency at the Frans Masereel Centre in Kasterlee, Belgium.
Rather than become a full-time artist, she chose to balance this with work as a professional nurse, serving as Pediatric Critical Care Transport Specialist at Stanford Medical Center as of 1998.
In 2003, Acebo Davis was awarded one of the three annual Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellowships, and she became the first Filipino American to exhibit art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco's Samsung Hall, where her piece Tabing Rising, visually describing her family's immigration to the United States in 1945, was displayed in 2004. In 2010, she served as Chairwoman of the Palo Alto Public Art Commission, continuing in this role into 2011.

Artistic themes and works

Acebo Davis's art is heavily rooted in her origins as a Filipino American, her family, and racial strife and collision. Dahil Sa Yo, her "seminal work", features repetitive images of her mother set behind multiple boxes of shoes, drawing on the public persona of Imelda Marcos. The repetition of the image serves to emphasize the importance of her mother and other women of her generation, who "held together their families and looked after their home" as immigrants. She is a member of the DIWA Filipino artists' collective, and regularly lectures on the Filipino identity, including lectures at the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Pennsylvania and Mills College.

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions