The Balikbayan Artist

Farm-laborer-turned-artist Vance Igorta returns to the Philippines as a balikbayan after nearly fifty years in the United States. He is a member of the Manong Generation, the largest diaspora of Filipinos who worked physically demanding jobs, mostly in California’s agricultural fields.

Coming home to a country on the brink of becoming a dictatorship, Vance’s paintings shift from abstractions to didactic, political art to better reflect the rebellion that he eventually joins. Didacticism also facilitates his meditations on the impact of leaving his birthland to become a powerless Manong and then an impoverished artist of color in New York.

The Balikbayan Artist—inspired by and dedicated to Venancio C. Igarta (1912–2000), the real-life leading artist of the Manong Generation—takes readers from the early twentieth century to the present day when Vance Igorta’s art is being discovered anew. His legacy is validated for allowing his art to address the tensions of his time instead of keeping it solely entrenched in aesthetic concerns. The artist’s choice reflects what Vance Igorta learned as a voraciously self-educated person: that in circumstances where power corrupts, what makes anyone and everyone dangerous is love.

Eileen R. Tabios (Author)

Eileen R. Tabios has released over seventy collections of poetry, fiction, art, essays, and experimental writings from publishers around the world. Translated into thirteen languages, she has also edited, co-edited, or conceptualized fifteen anthologies, which has involved hundreds of other poets and writers.