Visiting Artist Colloquium

media release: Discover the latest developments in fine art, craft, and design at our free public lectures by some of the nation’s most prominent artists, critics, and gallery and museum directors.

The Art Department Colloquium is a series supported by the Anonymous Fund and the Brittingham Trust. Faculty lectures are held every Tuesday and Visiting Artist lectures are held every Wednesday (Elvehjem L160) during the academic year, and are free and open to the public. Online at Zoom: go.wisc.edu/uw-art-talks

Oct. 11: In 2013, Precious Leano and Alex Baluyut co-founded the Art Relief Mobile Kitchen (ARMK) as a response to the devastation brought by Typhoon Yolanda (International Name: Haiyan). Since then, ARMK has set up community kitchens in ground zero of disaster areas to cook hot meals for victims of natural and man-made disasters. Precious leads missions to cook for evacuees/affected populations of disasters in any part of the country including volcano eruptions, floods, typhoons, earthquakes and the pandemic.

Precious Leano is a cultural worker—a curator, theater actor and copyright advocate. She co-curated Serene Light, an exhibition of photographs by Butch Baluyut at the Cultural Center of the Philippines and was the founding curator of the Crucible Art Gallery. She is the creator of WiSiK, an annual local artist gathering/show and tell from 2012 to 2020 and co-organized Nothing to Declare, an international exhibition held in Manila (2011). Since 1982, she has acted on and off in local productions in Los Banos and Manila. On copyright, she represented the Philippines in copyright fora in 2009 in Japan and Singapore; as a Fellow of the Advanced Training on Copyright and Related Rights in 2010 to 2011 in Oslo, Norway in Hanoi, Vietnam; and is one of the founders of the Filipino Visual Arts and Design Rights Organization (FILVADRO), the country’s first copyright organization for visual artists. Precious worked for various cultural and government institutions in the country as well as international organizations as communications consultant from 1983 to 2020.

Alex Baluyut is a pioneer in Phillippine photojournalism and documentary photography. Driven by the lifelong search for truth, he is known for his powerful and uncompromising images of rebellion, repression and resistance in the Phillippines. Alex became a photojournalist during the height of Martial Law under President Ferdinand Marcos. His body of work during this period affirms how the Filipino people endured and struggled despite the dictatorship, civil war, crime and conflict. In 1987, he won a National Book Award for his first book Kasama, which captured daily life within the New People’s Army. He won a second National Book Award for the book Brother Hood (1997) where he explored the web of relationships among hardened criminals, juvenile offenders, and authorities mandated to protect citizens. For his body of work, Invisible Photographer Asia named him as one of Asia’s most influential photographers. In 2013, he founded the non-profit Art Relief Mobile Kitchen to help survivors of Typhoon Haiyan. To date, ARMK has served some 800,000 meals to communities displaced by manmade and natural disasters throughout the country.