Pintô Art Museum is a private museum dedicated to the exhibition and study of Philippine contemporary art. Its name, Pintô, comes from the Filipino vernacular word for door or doorway and signifies the role of the institution as a threshold of the mind to aesthetic consciousness and cultural awareness. The museum's philosophy is defined by its founder and patron, renowned Filipino neurologist and medical educator Joven Cuanang, who began collecting the pieces from the early 1990s to the present. Later his extensive collection was formally presented to the public with the opening of the museum in 2010.

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Initially the acquisition of artworks began as support for the development of artist's careers of the group called The Salingpusa. But since then the collection has grown to include other pieces of the subsequent generations of artists, largely from those working in the figurative tradition. The collection features more than 200 works of sculptures, paintings and installations. The buildings that house the art pieces are designed by Antonio Leaño, himself among the original group of young stalwarts whom Cuanang supported in his early career. Surrounding the museum is a two hectare garden complex known as the Silangan Gardens, which in itself an ecological work with its variety of plants and flora, and a sanctuary for birds and local fauna. The Museum also operates a gallery, whose programs include exhibitions of contemporary Philippine art. Pintô Art Museum is located in Antipolo, a city known for being a pilgrimage site for the past four hundred years.

The Pintô Art Museum is now one of the 25 most Instagrammed museums in the world according to ArtNet.

In the years leading up to 1986's People Power Revolution, a group of fine art students at the University of the Philippines in Manila formed a friendship that would reshape Filipino contemporary art for many years to come. 

Determined to give talented students the opportunity to practice and grow, Professor of Painting Fernando Sena provided free supplies as part of an after-hours art workshop, creating a small collective of artists.

In the excitement following the People Power Revolution, numerous self-directed initiatives emerged, mostly outside metro Manila; in Antipolo, an ecology foundation was established to preserve the local waterfalls, attracting the young artists for weekend painting sessions.

“Salingpusa” is a Filipino idiom for kids who are too young to play rough, but too old to play at all. This is what the outsiders of the Filipino art scene called themselves.

Through their work in the ecology foundation, the Salingpusas were introduced to Dr Cuanang, a physician who would host them for Sunday refreshments and drawing sessions in the gardens surrounding his weekend house in the hills of Antipolo.

Learning of the struggles of these talented artists to find exhibition spaces, Dr Cuanang started to organize shows of their artistic production in his Silangan Gardens, now Pinto Art Museum. For their first show, Icons, in 1991, the artworks were hanged on clothes lines for the physician colleagues and friends from Manila.

The second clothesline exhibition “Flora” was held later that year. With the growing attention for the innovative works of the Salingpusa, Dr Cuanang converted also his downtown Manila home into Boston Gallery, which immediately became the main catalyst of early contemporary art in the Philippines under the curation of Bobby Valenzuela.

While the doctor kept building his career, the young artists made the Antipolo’s Silangan Gardens their headquarters, while several of them took up residence there for over a decade. They shared everything from meals, dramas, creation, love stories.

In this relaxed and supportive environment, the artists cemented their brotherly friendships that would last up to today; here some of the Salingpusa dress up for a costume parade at the University of the Philippines.

In their first years, the Salingpusa often practiced a form of interaction painting that was a carryover of lightning street murals of protest art. Like for “Karnabal”, a study was made from suggestion pitched by the individual artists, unified in a scaled composition, and then transferred on a larger scale.

The Salingpusa completed “Karnabal” in 1992. One of the seminal works of contemporary Filipino art, it provides a metaphor of Philippine society as a carnival of competing powers and pawns, so powerfully expressive of the social tensions following the People Power Revolution.

In this setting, the Salingpusa and Dr Cuanang helped draw the fledgling gallery’s activities and shows in Manila up until the late 90s. Above, some members of the group work on another collective mural for the annual Antipolo Maytime Arts Festival that they set up.

With the attention of the public and praise of the critic, many of the artists of the original group started to win painting competitions, and receive some of the most prestigious art awards of their days.

For their 15^th year of Salingpusa in 2001, finally the Pinto Art Gallery was opened in the Silangan Gardens in Antipolo. Ten years later followed the Pinto Art Museum, the opening of Dr Cuanang’s collection to the public. Since their birth Pinto and Boston Gallery have brought to prominence 3 generations of Filipino contemporary visual artists.

The collection and its context

The collection is a veritable record of the changes of the cultural milieu following the People Power Revolution in 1986. Highlighting this historical context is the large canvas Karnabal painted as a collaborative work by the artists of the Salingpusa group. This painting captures the critical mood of the period following the end of the Marcos regime and describes the post-revolutionary period as a carnival.

Pintô | Your Door to Philippine Contemporary Art

Karnabal by Salingpusa group

Works by artists such as Elmer Borlongan, Emmanuel Garibay, Neil Manalo, Mark Justiniani, Antonio Leano, Ferdinand Montemayor and Jose John Santos III also append to the reading of the state of transition of the society to the challenges of empowerment in the 1990s. The collection also plays a large part in describing a direction in Philippine contemporary art through the figurative tradition. This tradition traces its roots in Spanish colonial and academic art in the 1800s by way of church art, but found its unique form through the influence of Modern Art in the years previous to and following World War 2. Works in the museum show how Filipino artists were able to fuse academic art formation with personal integrations of modernist persuasions such as Surrealism, Expressionism, Minimalism to Social Realism and Conceptual Art but with a vigilance in identity and rootedness. The themes and subjects featured in the works appeal to the universal human condition, but expressed in the unique historical and cultural experience of being Filipino.

Opening hours
Tuesday – Sunday
9 am – 6 pm

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Pintô Art Museum
1 Sierra Madre St. Grand Heights Rd,
Antipolo, Rizal, Philippines

T +63 2 697 1015
museum@pintoart.com

Pintô Art Museum is a private museum dedicated to the exhibition and study of Philippine contemporary art. Its name, Pintô, comes from the Filipino vernacular word for door or doorway and signifies the role of the institution as a threshold of the mind to aesthetic consciousness and cultural awareness. The museum's philosophy is defined by its founder and patron, renowned Filipino neurologist and medical educator Joven Cuanang, who began collecting the pieces from the early 1990s to the present. Later his extensive collection was formally presented to the public with the opening of the museum in 2010.