Maia Cruz Palileo: Meandering Curves of a Creek at Pioneer Works

Meandering Curves of a Creek is Maia Cruz Palileo’s first solo institutional exhibition, comprised of a selection of recent paintings and drawings that continue the artist’s ongoing exploration of her personal identity, cultural heritage and feelings of multiplicity as a Filipino-American. This body of work traces a direct lineage to the ethnographic photographs of Dean C. Worcester, an American zoologist turned Secretary of the Interior who traveled to the Philippines at the turn of the nineteenth century. Palileo unearthed Worcester’s dehumanizing images in Chicago’s Newberry Library during the summer of 2017, and in turn used these photographs as a point of creative departure for transposing a bygone past into an intimately imagined world where history, myth, and superstition intersect.