MANILA, Philippines - The Metropolitan Museum of Manila and the Joya Family present “Joya/Journeys,” an exhibition of more than 40 travel sketches of National Artist Jose Joya, whose 80th birthday is posthumously celebrated this year with multi-venue exhibitions entitled “Joya Festival 2011.” The show runs until July 2 at the Tall Galleries, Met Museum, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Complex, Roxas Blvd, Manila.
For this occasion, Met Museum has chosen to exhibit drawings and sketches from the Joya family collection. When the museum was established in 1976, its mandate was to show and share art from other parts of the world with Filipino audiences. The curatorial decision to participate with “pictorial mementos” of Joya’s journeys is in a manner informed by that mandate, thus choosing to show foreign places, spaces and people, but seen and refracted through an exemplary eye, discerning, exact, artistic, and Filipino.
Travel’s consequences are many, as the intentions for going forth abroad are various. One brings home, inevitably, images of the experience of travel. Among the gains of the travels of Jose Joya are drawings and sketches. Joya called these drawings “a visual diary of my life and art.” They were a journal of travels the artist made to various parts of Asia, Europe, the United States of America, and the Philippines.
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