Visual artist Brenda Fajardo, known as one of the proponents of Philippine feminist art passed away on the night of 14 September at Cardinal Santos Medical Center in San Juan City. She was also an educator, curator, cultural worker, theater production designer and community organizer.
Born on 18 February 1940, Fajardo studied agriculture at the University of the Philippines (UP) Los Baños and later attended University of Wisconsin-Madison in United States as a Fulbright scholar to study art education. She obtained her doctoral degree in Philippine Studies from UP Diliman.
According to the UP President’s Committee on Culture and the Arts, in its Facebook post mourning her death, “[s]he was Professor Emerita at the Department of Art Studies, College of Arts and Letters where she taught for more than 35 years.”
The post further noted that she “is acknowledged for her contributions to art education, Philippine theater and extensive cultural work and advocacy.” As an accomplished visual artist, her works resonate with commentaries and narratives on the struggles of the common man, colonial past, the plight of women and socio-political history.
Fajardo is one of the leading feminist voices in Philippine visual arts, mining Philippine folklore and mythology to create exemplary works with historical, nationalist and women’s themes. She depicted social conditions and conveyed commentaries in ideological and mystical modes and images as if divining the destiny and history of the nation. These are exemplified by the “Baraha ng Buhay” series, also referred to as Tarot Card Series, for which she is known.
Fajardo has mounted numerous exhibits here and abroad; taught at the UP Diliman for many years; and founded and co-founded different arts, educational and cultural organizations, including the art collective Kasibulan (Kababaihan sa Sining at Bagong Sibol na Kamalayan) together with other women artists and the Philippine Art Educators Association.
She also became part of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), serving as head of the NCCA National Committee on Visual Arts in late 1990s and early 2000s.
Fajardo was recognized with the prestigious CCP Thirteen Artists award in 1992 and received the Centennial Award for the Arts from the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1998.
Fellow artists, colleagues and students paid tribute to her on social media upon hearing news of her death. CCP vice president and artistic director Dennis N. Marasigan described her as “the epitome of the Filipino artist.”
The Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) stated that she was a pillar of the theater company, “who has profoundly influenced the company’s educational theater work. From developing PETA’s unique brand of art education and conducting hundreds of integrated theater arts workshops all over the Philippines and abroad to setting the direction of the company’s curriculum practice and mentoring generations of PETA artist-teachers, Brenda leaves an undeniable legacy as one of the company’s most revered artist-teacher-leaders.
“Brenda has enriched PETA’s unique theater design practice with the development of the Aesthetics of Poverty — an approach that pushed the possibilities of designing for the stage with available materials,” PETA further said.
Fajardo worked on several PETA productions.
“Her legacy is immortalized on a wall of the PETA Theater Center lobby, with the painting Baraha ng Buhay PETA, which she designed and painted together with a team of visual artists. We celebrate the life of our beloved Manang Diday, indeed a key figure sa buhay ng PETA,” the group emphasized.
Writer Babeth Lolarga remembered being Fajardo’s student in Modern Art at the UP Diliman and encounters with her through the years: “Many years later, we would still run into each other, especially in a phase of my life called the Hiraya Gallery years when I hung out with curator Bobi Valenzuela, photographer Manny Chaves, occasionally owner Didi Dee (all gone, by the way). Teacher Brenda usually held her solo exhibitions there.”
She further said: “The one in that group who was closest to her was her kin, multimedia artist Noel Soler Cuizon who called her Tita Dida and just knew where her kiliti and frailties lay. When she weakened from illness and was confined to a wheelchair, she would still ask to be seated, at parties, near the dessert spread.
“She’d tell tales of her years as an art educator at the Ateneo and how she knew theater artists Anton Juan, Nonon Padilla, Paul Dumol from the time they were still wearing short pants in grade school! That was one of her howlers for indeed how can one imagine these giants in shorts,” she continued. “She outlived her younger sister, another memorable educator, Mary Joan, by some years, still not missing a good hearty meal, still sharing prayers in her private messages, even protesting the filing of presidential candidacy of one BBM.”
Lolarga ended: “She lived the way she practiced her art colorfully, with refinements observed as befitting her class, with enough robust stamina of the spirit to see her to the end. Rest well, Teacher Brenda. Your work was not in vain.”
The ongoing group exhibit Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists, which opened last 2 September at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, South Korea, features her works as well as works by other Filipino artists, Imelda Cajipe-Endaya, Agnes Arellano, Pacita Abad and Eisa Jocson, and serves as her last exhibit.