Iloilo, heritage, and culture: For the third time, with feeling
I visited Iloilo for the third time this year. It’s a city whose cultural, heritage and gastronomic charms I’ve grown to regard with familiarity and deep affection. An added bonus is the short one-hour flight from Manila, and the relative ease of hiring transportation (read: comfortable van and driver) to travel around the city and beyond.
The introductory visit in late January was to attend the Dinagyang Festival, a city-wide fiesta celebrated annually in Iloilo on the fourth Sunday of January. The main event for me then was the book launch of the groundbreaking publication, Houses Sugar Built. Written and produced by a daughter of Iloilo, Gina Consing McAdam, the lavishly photographed book is particularly notable for being the first to focus on commodity architecture in the Philippines. The commodity, in this case, was sugar, which was at its economic peak worldwide in the 1920s and ‘30s. The resulting sugar wealth engendered a flurry of architecturally significant, large homes in Iloilo, Bacolod, and Pampanga.
This first visit introduced me to the many ancestral homes portrayed in the book, as well as the churches and newly renovated town plazas that abound in the six districts of Iloilo City—Iloilo City Proper, Jaro, La Paz, Lapuz, Mandurriao, Molo, and Arevalo. I was also inititated into the rich gastronomic landscape of Iloilo, which in 2023 achieved the hard-won distinction of being named a UNESCO Creative City for Gastronomy.
A month later, in late February 2024, encouraged by my earlier visit, I became an intrepid tour guide to my mother and her best friend from the US who decided to explore Iloilo after my enthusiastic recommendation. I say “intrepid” because I was a non-Iloilo native serving as a tour guide with a self-devised itinerary, albeit supported by information from accommodating resource persons. With the aid of a helpful (and wise) driver and van that I hired for the second time around, we explored the homes and town plazas I had previously seen, the impressive city museums, and the far-flung areas of San Joaquin and Miag-ao with their beautiful churches.
We also visited weaving communities, including a particularly remote one in Oton that we had difficulty locating, driving on unlit roads amid lonely ricefields as the sun was setting. I had visions of checkpoints and armed bandits in my head as we continued travelling as darkness fell. We finally found the weaving cooperative, which had locked up as everyone had gone home. Luckily, some passersby were able to contact the women in charge to open up the workshop and show us around. This unforgettable adventure was engineered by my fearless 86-year-old mother, who works to promote Philippine weaving.
My latest visit, in November, third time around, was to witness a momentous cultural event that I believe will give Iloilo a firm foothold in the cultural map outside Manila. This is the loan by the Lopez Museum of 16 of its works by the Filipino masters Juan Luna, Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo, Fernando Amorsolo, and Juan Arellano, for a long-term, six-month exhibition at the University of the Philippines Visayas in its Iloilo campus. The exhibition, The Patrimony of All, was a huge endeavor, five years in the making, which was finally fulfilled and launched with a well-attended exhibit opening last Nov. 25, headlined by remarks from Rosalie Sarabia Treñas, wife of Mayor Jerry Treñas of Iloilo City.
The idea for the exhibition was proposed as far back as 2019 by former Senator Franklin Drilon, who has been a major force behind the remarkable economic progress of Iloilo in the last decade, and Mercedes “Cedie” Lopez Vargas, executive director of the Lopez Museum and Library. Substantial funding assistance was provided by Senator Loren Legarda. Former Secretary of Tourism Narz Lim, a Lopez Museum trustee as well as an Iloilo native, worked hard to bring together the team that helped make the exhibition in Iloilo possible. Vargas particularly emphasized the invaluable institutional support from the University of the Philippine Visayas-Iloilo, the exhibit venue, provided by the director of the Office of Initiatives for Culture and the Arts, Prof. Martin G. Genodepa, and the university’s chancellor, Clement C. Camposano.
Iloilo has always held a nostalgic and familial significance to the Lopez family who regard it as their hometown. As Vargas remarked in her speech, “It is in Iloilo that our family’s journey of hard work, philanthropy, and service to others began. It just made perfect sense to keep coming and giving back, uplifting the very community that had also shaped our own personal history.”
The venue of the exhibition, the University of the Philippines Visayas-Iloilo, is a pre-war neo-classical building designed by Juan Arellano, one of the artists included in the exhibition. A meticulous and thoughtful renovation program funded by grants from the NHCP and CHED assisted in the adaptive re-use of the main building into an arts and cultural hub for the university and Iloilo City. Originally built to serve as the municipio (town hall) of Iloilo, the iron grill doors still contain the initials “IMB,” for “Iloilo Municipal Board.” Sculptures by Italian artist Francesco Monti adorn the elegant classical façade, which is complemented by a clear and spacious frontage at the end of a long driveway. Today, it is home to a series of excellently curated exhibition spaces for indigenous textiles, visual arts, pottery, and more. Punctuated by several garden courtyards, grillwork, and unusual wooden ceiling beams from which hang reproduction iron chandeliers based on an original design by Juan Arellano, the building remains true to its design heritage and a wonderful example of adaptive re-use.
A significant issue for the curators involved in the exhibition was the risk in transporting the works safely from Manila to Iloilo as many logistical and environmental factors can affect the works negatively. The Lopez Museum’s manager of conservation, Margarita Villanueva, narrated how they created a sealed micro environment for each painting to maintain climate stability stability despite outside factors such as temperature, humidity, dust, etc. They also geo-tagged each package in order to be aware of its location at all times, a good move, as the crates were mystifyingly offloaded by the airline at some point. In any case, the works arrived safely and were installed with no further issues.
The Lopez Museum spared no effort to fulfill the proposed exhibition program. They engaged as curator the eminent Patrick Flores, currently based in Singapore’s National Gallery of Art as its deputy director for Curatorial and Exhibitions and is professor of Art Studies at UP Diliman. Flores is another proud son of Iloilo.
Installed in a former session hall of the building, The Patrimony of All (Ang Panublion Sang Tanan) is a survey of Western-style painting in the Philippines as reflected in the chosen works of Luna, Hidalgo, Amorsolo, and Juan Arellano. According to Flores, it seeks to illustrate an emerging Philippine sensibility in the different artists’ interpretations of historical, social and visual ideas of their time. The reference to patrimony belonging to all is inspired by Rizal’s remark, as Luna and Hidalgo were feted for the honors garnered by their work in Madrid in 1884, that “genius knows no country.”
It was heartening to see the important oil studies for Hidalgo’s major works, La Barca de Aqueronte and El Asesinato del Governador Bustamante y su Hijo. On a personal note, I was thrilled to spot a work by Juan Luna, also a study, La Moza y Lego, depicting a young woman picking fruit. This particular painting contains a dedication to my great-grandfather, the collector and art dealer Alfonso Ongpin, from Joaquin D. Luna, the younger brother of Juan Luna, dated 1920, 21 years after Juan’s death.
The exhibition was fully supported by the Iloilo City government through the Iloilo City Local Culture and Arts Council, and the M.I.C.E (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions) Office. As Mrs. Treñas said in her opening remarks, “The full support given by the Iloilo City government to enable arts, heritage, and culture to prosper is really an inspiration for others to emulate.”
Iloilo has long distinguished itself in the field of cultural patrimony with the establishment of three major city museums in the last five years: The NHCP (National Historical Commission of the Philippines) unveiled in 2019; the Museum of Philippine Economic History, housed in an original bahay na bato that served as the headquarters and storage warehouse of the trading house of Ynchausti y Compania which dealt in Manila hemp, liquor (Tanduay) and floor wax, among other Philippine products. There’s also The Museum of Philippine Maritime History situated in the Iloilo Customs House, designed in 1916 by American architect Ralph Harrington and was inaugurated by the NHCP in 2023. An excellent conceptual framework, combined with a visually stunning exhibition layout, distinguishes this museum which pays tribute to the rich maritime history of the Philippines, an archipelago of seafaring peoples. The National Museum of the Philippines situated its regional museum in the old Iloilo Provincial Jail, with collections dedicated to the heritage of the Western Visayas.
It is truly a vote of confidence in Iloilo City for a selection of important works of visual art from the invaluable holdings of one of the major Manila-based institutions, the Lopez Museum and Library, to be displayed here. The exhibition, The Patrimony of All, presents a new opportunity to engage with audiences in this economically and culturally progressive city, and it will be interesting to see how it will be received and engaged with by the wider local community. May it continue to pave the way towards even more exciting arts and culture happenings in the future.
