Remembering National Artist Larry Alcala on Museums and Galleries Month
Museums are repositories of what a people are, their best and their worst.
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Museums are repositories of what a people are, their best and their worst.
Larry Alcala’s self-portrait.
Photograph courtesy of Larry Alcala/ig
Museo ng Muntinlupa.
Photograph courtesy of City of Muntinlupa
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If editorial cartoonist Larry Z. Alcala were alive today (he passed away in 2002 due to heart attack), would he be able to do an engaging but telling “Slice of Life” visual vignettes on our 2025 “floodgate?”
Would he care to? Or he would be overwhelmed and just quietly proclaim the country and its people doomed and hopeless?
What triggered us to recall today the brilliant and Pinoy-loving Alcala is the fact that we are celebrating this October the Museums and Galleries Month as spearheaded by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). Museums are repositories of what a people are, their best and their worst.
We are not aware of other Pinoy artists who have mastered the art of rendering Filipino foibles the way Alcala had. That mastery is certainly among the reasons he was posthumously named National Artist for Visual Arts in 2019. Since he was connected with newspapers and komiks (graphic vignettes and illustrated novels) in Tagalog/Filipino, he seemed to have never bothered with the peculiarities of foreigners in the country, though it is possible that he had hand-drawn vignettes of interactions between the Pinoys and the foreigners in the country and in the diaspora. A substantial bulk of his works are preserved in Museo Sanso in San Juan, where he is occasionally featured, to remind Pinoys how great they can be in little ways — may it be every day or on special occasions.
How we have survived so far the treachery of our perversely greedy infrastructure contractors and government officials is worth instilling into works of art as rendered by Alcala or someone following his worthy footsteps. (But then we hope the grandchildren of this era’s network of thieves in public works and other government agencies do not follow their stealing grandparents; some of the adult children are the dummies in the firms of their robber parents!)
Museo ng Muntinlupa
Did you know that Muntinlupa City has an official museum?
The NCCA recently took a bunch of lifestyle journalists and vloggers to the five-story museum, which was completed in March 2019.
The museum stands on a 3,000-square-meter lot at Centennial Avenue in the City’s Barangay Tunasan.
It was designed by Beaudon Causapin, the city architect at that time. The building’s façade design is based on the salakab, a traditional fishing trap made from woven bamboo sticks and fasted by rattan rope often used by fishers working in Laguna de Bay. The design is a tribute to city’s fishing industry, a major mover of the city’s economy.
The museum’s ochre columns and wire netting were devised to manage the building’s temperature by absorbing and deflecting heat.
The museum hosts a main gallery, a mayor’s hall, an interactive science center and a theater with a 200 seating capacity. It hosts exhibits featuring the city’s history — from the precolonial era until the modern period. It also features works of the city’s contemporary artists and temporary exhibitions.
We will tell you more in a serene column in October about the other museums in this actually culture-loving country. We actually have more than 300 established museums.
