Maia Cruz Palileo

Maia Cruz Palileo is a Filipino-American artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and installation. Her work centers on the entanglements of colonial history, migration, and cultural memory, often moving fluidly between reality and fiction. With gestural brushwork and dreamlike color, she reconstructs complex constellations of private memory and collective narrative, giving new visibility and life to histories that are seen and unseen.
In 2017, supported by the Jerome Foundation, Palileo conducted research at the Newberry Library in Chicago, delving into colonial archives and the representational logic of ethnographic imagery. She draws particular inspiration from the humanist perspective of Damián Domingo — the “father of Filipino painting.” Palileo’s work weaves together Filipino folklore, literature, and oral traditions, generating a visual language suspended between archive and imagination, and evoking a world akin to magical realism.