The Collection

Maia Cruz Palileo is a multidisciplinary artist whose paintings, sculptures, drawings, and installations explore migration, memory, and the porous concept of home. Drawing on their Filipino American heritage, Palileo mines family archives, oral histories, and ethnographic photographs to create lush, layered compositions that blur the line between fact and fiction. Figures and landscapes emerge in dreamlike settings, where memory and imagination converge to resist the flattening gaze of colonial narratives.

Influenced by the “tropical gothic” sensibility of Filipino literature and the improvisational quality of oral storytelling, Palileo reconfigures historical imagery to honor lives often misrepresented or erased. Their process frequently involves research into 19th- and 20th-century colonial archives—such as those of Dean Worcester and Damián Domingo—recontextualizing these sources through cutouts, rubbings, and collage before translating them into vibrant oil paintings. In doing so, Palileo resuscitates figures from exploitative histories and restores to them dignity, spirit, and agency.

Palileo received their BA in Studio Art from Mount Holyoke College (2001) and MFA in Sculpture from Brooklyn College, CUNY (2008), and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2015). Their work has been exhibited at institutions including the Cummer Museum (Jacksonville, 2023), Kimball Arts Center (Park City, 2022), CCA Wattis Institute (San Francisco, 2021), American University Museum (Washington, D.C., 2019), and Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, 2018). Recent group shows include the Pérez Art Museum Miami (2024), Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University (2024), Moderna Museet (Stockholm, 2023), the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (2022), and the Seattle Art Museum (2022).

Their work is in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; San José Museum of Art; Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens; Library of Congress; Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University; Speed Art Museum; and the Fredriksen Collection at the National Museum, Oslo, among others. Palileo is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, the NYFA Painting Fellowship, and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Award.