Oakland interdisciplinary artist and healer Kimberley Acebo Arteche’s multimedia installations serve as windows into the nuanced and many-layered lives of women, workers and people with roots in the Philippines, but often displaced in diasporic communities.
“When you’re part of any immigrant diaspora, it’s always a question of: ‘Am I Filipino enough? Am I American enough? Do I really feel at home in any place?’” says Arteche, whose work is on view through Nov. 15 in “Homebound,” a group exhibition at Skyline College in San Bruno.
“As a woman, as a daughter, that layer of home is extra loaded,” Arteche says. “You’re socialized to be responsible for what home is like, being the oldest daughter, older sister, and then there’s the question of, ‘Do I feel at home in my body? Do I feel safe?’”
Arteche’s visual art intersects with cultural and consulting work, building community and documenting the lives and legacies of Bay Area LGBTQ Filipinx residents. One current project involves composing and compiling portraits of Bay Area queer Filipinx people, their families and allies for the Hormel Center Collections at the San Francisco Public Library.
“My goal is to be able to connect people with themselves and their communities. I do that with art, with healing, with consulting. It’s very simple, but I have many approaches to it,” they said.
Arteche arrived in the Bay Area in 2013 to pursue a degree at San Francisco State University after receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at University of Maryland. Historian Theo Gonzalves, now a curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, suggested SFSU as a place to study and seek community. Diving into community work, Arteche by 2019 co-founded Balay Kreative, an artist’s space in SOMA Pilipinas, San Francisco’s Filipino Cultural Heritage District.
“My first two years, I didn’t think I was going to get so deep into it,” said Arteche of their post- graduate journey. “My department wasn’t as diverse as I wanted it to be. I had some professors of color, but they were all men. Filipinx have an incredible legacy of female leadership.”
Arteche isn’t too particular about her chosen she/they pronouns, given that in Tagalog, the predominant language in the Philippines, pronouns aren’t gendered.
“Before colonization, gender was fluid. Both our men and women traditionally wear tube skirts,” Arteche explained. “Growing up me and my brother would get confused who our mother was yelling at.”
Arteche’s mother’s experience as a nurse, recruited from the Philippines in 1979 to serve at Howard University Hospital in Washington, D.C., is a common path for Filipinas in the caregiving field.
“My mom went to an American school in the Philippines, she speaks English and knows how to speak English, but people see her and assume she can’t…they hear her accent and turn off.”
“Thinking of her experience as a nurse and my experience as an artist… we aren’t treated as full humans. That experience is ingrained in being a woman and being responsible for people’s care and creating home for people. Not just for my family, but for Filipino women being sent out as caregivers all over the globe.”
“Bodyless,” one of Arteche’s depictions of women’s suffering—textured and text-driven, ephemeral yet grounded—is on view at Skyline College in “Homebound,” which features work concerning the complicated, often disquieting, concept of home.
“The photo [a woman’s torso, no limbs or head] is me when people don’t fully humanize me,” explained Arteche. “The text is my experience of grief.”
The work is informed by the Atlanta spa shootings in 2021. Arteche says, “There was so much violence at the time against Asian women’s bodies… it’s so deep in the culture. Why is it so difficult to feel safe in our own bodies? Why is this immense burden placed on us? I’m grateful to be a woman, and also it sucks.”
But there also are threads of joy and hope in Arteche’s works. Strategically embedded in another piece, in draped fabric, is a collection of golden anting-anting amulets, protective charms to ward off evil and bestow blessings and well-being to the devoted.
“Anting-anting is a deep practice in the Philippines,” says Arteche.
Those who seek counsel through Arteche’s healing practice are often stressed and overtired and looking for ways to connect with their culture and heritage.
“They are the ones having a hard time living in capitalism, fighting patriarchy, depression and anxiety or who have experienced sexual assault,” says Arteche. Often our cultures don’t have the right resources to provide support. The Western resources can be really triggering and not helpful.”
Assisting in the reclamation of spirit and a sense of wholeness, Arteche uses ancestral work, breathing, and without fail, art: “Art is always part of reclaiming cultural heritage. Always. One hundred percent of the time. Something about the creative processes helps you connect with your ancestry,” says Arteche.
“Homebound” continues through Nov. 15 in the Skyline College Art Gallery, Building 1, 3300 College Drive, San Bruno. Admission is free. Visit events.skylinecollege.edu.
Arteche is participating in a Queer Altar Building and Breathing workshop at 1 p.m. Nov. 10 at James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center, SF Public Library, third floor, 100 Larkin St., San Francisco. Visit sfpl.org.
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