Maia Cruz Palileo creates paintings, works on paper, installations, and sculptures that honor familial archives and imagined contemporary realities. Beginning from a space of personal inquiry around their family’s migration from the Philippines to America, Palileo quickly uncovered connective points between individual histories and broader global systems, like colonization, displacement, assimilation. The artist’s research into overlapping historical timelines, paired with effects of memory, provides a framework for their color-rich compositions. This overlapping is made physical through the layering of oil paint, which—even in instances where one layer is concealed by another—permanently maintains its material presence on the canvas, creating its own recorded history.

Part of the Fine Arts Visiting Artist Lecture Series