At 77, Artist Imelda Cajipe Endaya is the First Woman to Receive Top Philippine Honor

At 77 years of age, Filipina artist Imelda Cajipe Endaya received the Order of National Artists of the Philippines for Visual Arts. This marks the first time a woman has ever received the honor.

The Order of National Artists, established in 1972, is the country’s highest national recognition for Filipinos who have made distinct and significant contributions to art in the Philippines. The distinction was conferred on September 1 on the recommendation of the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts.

The recognition honors Endaya’s more than five decades of pioneering work in feminist and socially engaged art. Since the 1970s, Endaya’s social realist paintings, printmaking, and installations have considered the struggles of Philippine society, including gender and labor inequality and cultural identity, as well as concepts of migration, globalization, and diasporic communities.

“I wanted to insert a part of my reality into the painting,” Endaya told Artforum about paintings she made for an exhibition at Silverlens gallery in New York last summer.

Her work is held in the collections of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Philippine National Art Gallery, National Gallery of Singapore, Metropolitan Museum Manila, Okinawa Prefectural Museum, and Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Her landmark 2022 retrospective at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, “Pagtutol at Pag-asa (Refusal and Hope),” affirmed her legacy to Philippine art. In 2026, her work was presented internationally at S.E.A. Focus in Singapore and Art Basel Hong Kong.

In addition to her art practice, Endaya is also a writer, curator, organizer, and informal educator. She cofounded the collective of women artists Kasibulan and Pananaw: Philippine Journal of Visual Arts. She was also affiliated with the Philippine Association of Printmakers from 1970 to 1976 and served on the National Commission for Culture and the Arts Committee on Visual Arts from 1995 to 2001.

In a statement, Endaya expressed her gratitude for winning the award, looking with enthusiasm toward the future of feminist art in her homeland: “People say I have just broken a glass ceiling. There should be more successful women artists after me.”