CCP’s 2024 Thirteen Artists Awards exhibit opens in National Museum of Fine Arts this October

The Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) recently celebrated the newest recipients of the prestigious Thirteen Artists Awards (TAA) in a special ceremony, followed by the opening of the exhibition at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Manila. 

TAA recognizes individuals whose work has made a significant impact on the country’s artistic and cultural landscape. The awarding ceremony honored Filipino visual artists Catalina Africa, Denver Garza, Russ Ligtas, Ella Mendoza, Henrielle Baltazar Pagkaliwangan, Issay Rodriguez, Luis Antonio Santos, Joshua Serafin, Jel Suarez, Tekla Tamoria, Derek Tumala, Vien Valencia, and Liv Vinluan. The young artists were recognized for their unique artistic practice that reflects and responds to the contemporary realities of the human experience.  

"Out of 108 nominations, and through a meticulous process, thirteen artists were chosen to carry the legacy forward. These artists will redefine and provoke the social order, while reflecting their truths and realities," CCP President Kaye C. Tinga said.

The exhibition, featuring the diverse and innovative works of this year’s awardees, will be open to the public until January 12, 2026, offering a unique opportunity to experience the evolving richness of Philippine art.

For the exhibit curator Mervy C. Pueblo, the 2024 Thirteen Artists Awardees reveal a Philippine art that is awake, attentive, and insistently present. Across media and methods—video, sculpture, tapestry, watercolor, installation—they dwell in the spaces where memory, care, nature, and material converge, reflecting a generation that listens to the world with curiosity, care, and imagination.

Russ Ligtas explores the dynamism of memory through performance and installation, challenging normative histories and resisting to be forgotten. 

Henrielle Baltazar Pagkaliwangan displays prints and artist books, directing audiences to the thought of identity as a lasting process rather than a product. 

Tekla Tamoria weaves history into a tapestry of truths, reviving the social history of the Filipino woman and reminding us of the timelessness of their making practices. 

Together, these artists remind us that memory and history are not merely the past, but enduring realities that remain vivid. Remembering is a resistance against the diminishing of their truths. 

Catalina Africa’s sculptural installation introduces her “personal cosmology,” a glimmer for the observer to reconnect with their identity.

Issay Rodriguez encourages scientific discussions in her installation, fusing humanist and ecological notions to realize a shared knowledge. 

Liv Vinluan reimagines extinct and endangered flora, splashing color into seemingly slipping memories. These three artists reinvent the art of noticing, reminding viewers to look closer into where we stand. 

Ella Mendoza exposes observers into discomfort with her installation, a work that stands not to depict violence but to criticize the quiet that persists alongside its existence. 

Luis Antonio Santos turns galvanized iron sheets into palimpsests of lived experiences, refusing invisibility for the impermanent yet meaningful walls of our history. 

Vien Valencia visits the arts of moving, bringing attention to the spaces we inhabit to claim autonomy. These artists spotlight the mundane and the reality that are often masked to seem familiar.

Small gestures accumulate into a collective struggle in Denver Garza’s participatory installation, allowing burdens and hopes to be externalized and ritualized for a community to carry together. 

Jel Suarez takes fragments and arranges them into what she calls specimens, giving new life without relinquishing what has been. Garza and Suarez open spaces for participation, emphasizing that the smallest acts of care allows even the fragmented to thrive once more. 

Joshua Serafin reinvigorates the multiplicity of Filipino identity before colonialist and Western impositions by performing a return to precolonial mythologies where diversity and fluidity were prized and celebrated. 

In Derek Tumala’s installation, endangered species parallel with precarious artists, striking a conversation about environmental collapse in relation with the vulnerability of the Filipino culture. As artists, Serafin and Tumala protest against erasure and invisibility, fighting for the queer, artistic, and ecological lives to survive and strive. 

“We’re very proud to do what we can for the CCP for this period where its facilities are being upgraded, we all know that it is long overdue and we’re all supporting actively, morally, the effort to upgrade the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ buildings and then, once that’s done we hope the National Museum upgrade our facilities. We need more space, better facilities in order to house more works of Art, works of heritage. And we’re all progressing, kahit papaano, together with the CCP and National Museum and that’s evident in collaborations such as this one today,” said National Museum of the Philippines Director General Jeremy Barns.

The Thirteen Artists create not only artworks, but statements on current social landscapes in the country. They strive to develop Philippine art into a practice that is capable of paying attention and listening to the crises of the contemporary times, becoming voices for the people of the past, present and the future. Bodies, materials, and spaces become margins for Filipino culture and history, insistent on being visible for their truths. 

Established in 1970, the TAA began as a curatorial project of the CCP Museum under direction of Roberto Chabet. It focused on works of artists who grasped to “restructure, restrengthen, and renew artmaking and art thinking… that lend viability to Philippine art.” Raymundo Albano, the succeeding director of the CCP Museum, transformed the project into a triennial program of recognition. 

The exhibition is free and open to the public daily from October 7, 2025 to January 12, 2026 between 9:00 AM and 6:00 PM at Sandiganbayan Reception Hall, National Museum of Fine Arts.

For more information on the TAA, visit the official website (www.thirteenartists.culturalcenter.gov.ph). To get the latest news on CCP’s events and programs, you may follow the official social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok.