The Brooklyn Rail

It (almost) seems that it’s a career requirement for artists to do time as security guards at one of New York’s major museums. The duo that make up the collective Abang-guard are two such artists, even slipping their day job into their collaborative name, which, also a play on avant-garde, incites revolutionary thoughts.

Maureen Catbagan and Jevijoe Vitug, both born in the Philippines in the mid-1970s, met at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and have worked together since 2017. Being museum guards influences their practice and themes, centered on labor, immigration, racism, and visibility, and invisibility. As guards, they find themselves largely invisible, a circumstance paralleling the plight of many Filipino Americans and other marginalized groups. Part of their job, however, is to make the invisible perceptible to visitors by explaining the works on view, giving directions within the museum, and making recommendations, in addition to protecting the art, all of which is factored into projects that beam a light on Filipino art and culture.

Makibaka, the title of their eye-opening show, is a political rallying cry (which, loosely translated, means “coming together for change” or “joining in the struggle” in Tagalog). It is Abang-guard’s first institutional solo exhibition, on view at the Queens Museum and organized by assistant curator Sarah Cho in response to the sixtieth anniversary of the New York World’s Fair of 1964–65.

Catbagan and Vitug have positioned their works (all dated 2025) in dialogue with well-known (white, male) artists, including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein, who were shown at the World’s Fair. It was, however, the inclusion of a Philippines Pavilion as an officially recognized nation that particularly excited their imagination. Abang-guard replicates the shape of a salakot—a laborer’s peaked hat adopted as the symbol of the Filipino liberation movement—in an installation composed of gleaming metal tubes that are both time capsules and care packages, a nod to the diasporic custom of sending parcels between families. Accompanied by a ramp packed tightly with garments representing people, it pays tribute to an unprecedented moment of solidarity between Filipino and Mexican farm workers who triumphantly banded together during the 1965 Delano Grape Strike in California to demand better working conditions and pay. Equally important are the names of more than six dozen protesters inscribed on the capsules, including Larry Itliong, labor activist, hero, and a founder of the United Farm Workers union. Abang-guard repeatedly employs acknowledgements like these to underscore working class Filipinos’ individuality and visibility.

Bridged Monuments - Stockton and Delano, CA is a captivating seven-channel video elegantly configured as an upside-down monument that does not honor elites. Instead, it memorializes the Filipino social clubs, restaurants, community centers, parks, and other beloved establishments of the Little Manila neighborhood in Stockton (the first of its kind in the US) that were closed or razed to accommodate a freeway that tore through the community’s heart in the early seventies. In the video, the duo performs in full uniform before some of these (named) sites as guardians of time and place, their movements coordinated, precise, and low-key, like a kind of minimalist dance. Footage of interviews with activists fighting for preservation of what remains are intercut by glimpses of the highway system. Sounds familiar? The connection to Robert Moses, President of the World’s Fair and New York City’s “master builder” is purposeful since many of the highway systems he constructed also decimated working class and immigrant neighborhoods across the city, displacing tens of thousands, and raising questions about what is preserved, what is demolished, and who decides.

In an adaptation of 13 Most Wanted Men, Andy Warhol’s mural for the World’s Fair, America’s Most Help Wanted (After Warhol) honors the influx of trained Filipina nurses who immigrated to the US in the wake of a nursing shortage that arose after the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, fulfilling a desperate need in this country at the time. Their (named) portraits, with gazes often directly addressing the viewer, are arranged in a colorful grid in the flashy colors of Pop art but Filipina-cized by details such as symbolic tattoos, traditional embroidery patterns, gold earrings, and the evident pride in their looks and femininity.

Despite the passage of the Hart-Celler Act in 1965 (referred to in another work here), which paved the way for wider immigration to the US from non-Western countries and targeted the kind of racism that workers like Filipina nurses experienced, these harmful prejudices still exist today. Though these professional medical workers have made a profound contribution to American life, and were applauded as essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, gratitude for their efforts soon evaporated as the US became engulfed in yet another wave of indiscriminate anti-Asian sentiment.

Another painting, taking its cue from the mural Girl in Window, Roy Lichtenstein’s contribution to the World’s Fair, depicts Corazon Amurao, the sole survivor of a horrific killing of eight student nurses in 1966 when such killings were rare. Framed by a window, she stands with her mouth agape, possibly crying for help, warning others, or expressing anger at the lack of care and assistance for their plight.

There are only seven works in the show, but each, circling the momentous events of 1965, ripples outward in widening gyres of implications. It is a succinct, but comprehensive course about the Filipino story here in the US at a moment when the future is up for grabs and the American dream is more of a mirage than ever for countless people who once thought this land was a beacon of possibilities in a dark world.