The country’s newest National Artists worked in radically different forms—from social-realist painting and cinema to architecture, ballet and textile design. Together, their careers reveal how Filipino culture is made, preserved and passed on.
What does a painter of Negros sugar workers have in common with the architect behind some of modern Manila’s most recognizable buildings?
What connects a filmmaker searching for stories in ordinary life with a designer fighting to keep Filipino textile traditions alive?
They are now part of the same cultural lineage.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has proclaimed 10 new National Artists: Nicanor Tiongson and Gregorio Brillantes for Literature; Imelda Cajipe Endaya and Nunelucio Alvarado for Visual Arts; Gabriel Formoso for Architecture; Rafael “Nonoy” Froilan for Dance; Maria Beatriz “Patis” Tesoro for Design; Armando “Bing” Lao for Film and Broadcast Arts; Teodoro Hilado for Theater; and Alfredo S. Buenaventura for Music.
Formoso, Brillantes, Lao and Hilado were honored posthumously.
With 10 recipients, it is the largest single batch since the Order of National Artists was established in 1972.
But numbers tell only part of the story.
Look beyond the disciplines attached to their names and this class offers something more interesting: a portrait of Filipino culture built from many directions—not only by creating celebrated work, but by documenting communities, preserving traditions, mentoring younger artists and expanding what Philippine art could become.
Making Filipino lives visible
Some of the strongest connections within this group can be found in artists who turned their attention toward people and experiences that could easily have remained outside the cultural spotlight.
Nunelucio Alvarado found much of his subject matter in Negros.
His socially engaged paintings have depicted farmers, sugar workers and marginalized communities, often using distorted or exaggerated figures to convey the physical and economic realities surrounding labor.
His 1994 painting Hulat Sweldo, part of the National Fine Arts Collection, centers on the plight of sakadas, or migrant farmworkers, and delayed wages.
Alvarado’s career also demonstrates why Philippine art cannot be understood exclusively through Manila. Based in Sagay City, Negros Occidental, he helped foster artistic communities while producing work deeply connected to the social landscape around him.
Imelda Cajipe Endaya, meanwhile, turned her practice toward questions of women, identity, history and power.
Working in painting, printmaking, installation and mixed media, Endaya emerged as an important voice in socially engaged Philippine art. She also helped create spaces in which other women artists could be seen and heard, co-founding KASIBULAN, a collective of women artists, in 1987.
Her designation carries another distinction: Endaya is the first woman named National Artist for Visual Arts.
In literature, Gregorio Brillantes approached Filipino life differently.
Rather than the physical labor depicted by Alvarado or the gender and political questions explored by Endaya, Brillantes often started with seemingly ordinary lives and allowed them to open into larger questions about faith, mortality and existence.
Stories such as The Distance to Andromeda and Faith, Love, Time and Dr. Lazaro demonstrated how the provincial, domestic and deeply Filipino could coexist with questions far larger than any particular place.
Three artists, three different methods—but a common proposition: everyday Filipino experience was worthy of serious art.
Keeping tradition alive without freezing it in time
Preserving culture can sound like an act of looking backward.
The careers of Patis Tesoro, Nicanor Tiongson and Alfredo Buenaventura suggest something more complicated.
For Tesoro, preservation became inseparable from design.
Her work with Filipiniana is widely recognizable, but the clothes represent only the visible end of a much larger process. Tesoro became an advocate for piña and other Philippine textile and craft traditions, working with the communities whose knowledge makes those materials possible.
That distinction is important.
A traditional textile cannot survive merely because designers continue to admire it. Farmers must produce its fibers. Artisans must know how to process them. Weavers and embroiderers must continue practicing skills that take years to master.
Tesoro understood heritage as a living supply of knowledge rather than simply an aesthetic to reproduce.
Nicanor Tiongson approached preservation through scholarship.
Across decades of work as a scholar, critic, playwright and educator, Tiongson studied Philippine theater, film and popular performance, including traditional forms such as the komedya.
His work helped establish that popular and traditional culture deserved the same intellectual attention given to more institutionally prestigious forms.
The effect was not merely archival. To document how communities perform, watch and sustain cultural traditions is also to explain something about the society that created them.
Composer and educator Alfredo S. Buenaventura pursued another route, bringing Philippine subjects, history and musical ideas into classical composition.
Works inspired by figures and stories including Maria Makiling and Diego Silang placed Filipino material within orchestral, operatic and choral traditions.
Buenaventura also spent much of his career teaching, extending his influence beyond the music carrying his own name.
Together, their work raises a useful question about heritage: What is the point of preserving a tradition if nobody carries it forward?
Their answer, in different forms, was to make it usable again.
Changing who—and what—gets the spotlight
Performance depends on things audiences see.
It also depends on things they are not supposed to notice.
That makes the pairing of Rafael “Nonoy” Froilan, Bing Lao and Teodoro Hilado particularly revealing.
Froilan helped expand the professional possibilities for Filipino male ballet dancers.
As a dancer, choreographer and teacher closely associated with Ballet Philippines, he built a career that helped elevate the male dancer from a supporting presence into an artist with his own dramatic and technical authority.
His influence was therefore larger than any individual performance. Visibility creates possibility: younger dancers can imagine careers partly because someone before them demonstrated that those careers could exist.
Film screenwriter Armando “Bing” Lao exercised a quieter but similarly far-reaching influence.
Lao worked on acclaimed films including Kubrador, Serbis and Kinatay, but his impact on Philippine cinema also came through teaching.
His screenwriting workshops and “Found Story” approach encouraged filmmakers to look closely at lived experience—to find narrative in the behavior, contradictions and circumstances of ordinary people instead of automatically imposing familiar formulas on them.
That thinking became particularly relevant to Philippine independent cinema, where filmmakers frequently worked outside conventional commercial structures.
Then there is Teodoro “Teddy” Hilado, whose medium was light itself.
Hilado helped establish professional lighting design and technical production as essential artistic disciplines in Philippine theater.
Lighting can determine what an audience notices, where a scene seems to exist and how a performance feels. Yet when it succeeds, viewers may never consciously think about it.
Hilado’s recognition therefore acknowledges something larger than one theatrical career. It recognizes the artists behind the artists—the technical practitioners whose work makes performance possible.
Froilan commanded the stage. Lao helped rethink what reached the screen. Hilado shaped what audiences could see.
Each changed the terms of performance from a different position.
Building the Philippines in concrete and glass
Gabriel Formoso left a different kind of cultural record.
You can walk into it.
His architectural practice helped shape the modernizing Manila of the postwar period, with projects associated with his body of work including the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas complex, the Asian Institute of Management building, the PNB Financial Center and The Peninsula Manila.
Architecture occupies an unusual place in cultural life because people encounter it constantly without necessarily thinking of themselves as an audience.
A building becomes an office, a hotel, a school or a landmark. Eventually it becomes part of the visual grammar of a city.
Formoso’s work emerged as Metro Manila was developing into the country’s modern corporate and financial center. His buildings consequently did more than occupy the changing city.
They helped give that city a physical identity.
Unlike a painting hanging inside a museum, architecture cannot easily be separated from everyday life. Thousands of people may experience an architect’s work without ever learning the architect’s name.
National recognition brings Formoso’s name back into the foreground—and asks Filipinos to look again at the places around them.