Isabel Manalo

b. 1968

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Isabel Manalo is a multi-media visual artist, educator and curator. From 2000 - 2012, Isabel taught at American University's Department of Art both as an Adjunct and Visiting Assistant Professor. She served on the Board of Directors and the Visual Arts Committee for the District of Columbia Arts Center from 2010 - 2012. Her work is represented in Washington D.C. by Addison Ripley Fine Art where she has had two solo shows in 2009 and 2012 and now 2015. This past spring she exhibited a site specific installation at the new works gallery at the Orlando Museum of Art. She is also preparing for a solo exhibit at the Paul Zuccaire Gallery at the University of Stonybrook, Long Island, NY for February 2016. 

Isabel is also an Independent Curator and the Founder and Director of The Studio Visit (TSV), an online art journal featuring artists in their studios. Her experience as an academic educator inspired the creation of TSV in 2008. The focus on studio practice and process is the emphasis of TSV and further empasizes this mission through the art critique -- a fundamental social dialogue that balances the necessary solitary nature of independent studio rigor. Please see TSV's website to find out more about both the virtual and physical programming TSV offers.

She is currently living and working in Berlin where she served in 2012 -2013 as a Visiting Artist and Curator at Takt International Artist Residency where she conducts weekly art critiques and seminars for the artists in residence and curated them in group shows. Her expertise, scholarship and passion support and promote visual artists working in all mediums and career levels. In July 2011, She curated a group show in Washington D.C. at Addison Ripley Fine Art called "CultureScape" featuring the work of five emerging artists: Mei Mei Chang, Bridget Sue Lambert, Lisa Blas, Hedieh Ilchi and Elise Richman. She recently curated "Outside In" this past October 2012, a site specific installation that was on view this past October in Berlin executed by two Washington D.C. artists Megan Muller and Sam Scharf.

As an artist, Isabel has been showing her work internationally since 1999.  Her work is a part of numerous private and public collections including the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, the permanent collections of the US Embassies in Bulgaria, Kazakhtsan and Nepal to name a few. Her work has been shown at the McLean Project for the Arts, Arlington Art Center, Maryland Art Place, the Katzen Arts Center, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art and has been the subject of group and solo shows in Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia and New York. She was featured in New American Paintings in 2004 and 2006 and was awarded a Fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2008, 2009 and 2011 with support from the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation for 2009. Manalo's work is included in the Drawing Center and White Columns curated artist registries.

Isabel received her MFA in Painting from Yale University, a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

My work has become more about the hand and less about the image. It is less about the abstraction of space but rather the abstraction of language and the  image of the Baybayin as manifest with thread and collage on different surfaces of paper. Using the pre-colonial alphabet from the Philippines -- called the Baybayin -- is a way to communicate my deepest thoughts through the written word, yet in a script that isn’t used anymore nor can be read or necessarily accessed by the general public. While it is clearly a written form, the process becomes visual for me.
 
I stitch the calligraphic lines as if I was stitching a wound. The process of sewing reminds me of my mother and the endless hours she spent sewing dresses for my sisters and myself. It was a large part of her identity and by including the sewing; it makes her present in this body of work almost akin to painting a narrative portrait of her.
 
Paint becomes blisters; photographs are cut and glued like pretty Band-Aids we see at the local drug stores. It resolves into a tactile discomfort of thread, knots, paint boils and cut paper that evokes a life that is uncontrolled, but hoping to be beautiful, somehow. Stitching the Seam,the title of my solo show at the Orlando Museum of Art that opened on March 6, 2014, refers to the multitude of feelings that connect me to the minutiae of everyday, to the tragic and spectacular of the bigger planet we endeavor to call home.

Flash Flood

Isabel Manalo

2010 Photographs and acrylic on Yupo paper 22" x 30" Courtesy of the artist

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Isabel Manalo

b. 1968
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Isabel Manalo is a multi-media visual artist, educator and curator. From 2000 - 2012, Isabel taught at American University's Department of Art both as an Adjunct and Visiting Assistant Professor. She served on the Board of Directors and the Visual Arts Committee for the District of Columbia Arts Center from 2010 - 2012. Her work is represented in Washington D.C. by Addison Ripley Fine Art where she has had two solo shows in 2009 and 2012 and now 2015. This past spring she exhibited a site specific installation at the new works gallery at the Orlando Museum of Art. She is also preparing for a solo exhibit at the Paul Zuccaire Gallery at the University of Stonybrook, Long Island, NY for February 2016. 

Isabel is also an Independent Curator and the Founder and Director of The Studio Visit (TSV), an online art journal featuring artists in their studios. Her experience as an academic educator inspired the creation of TSV in 2008. The focus on studio practice and process is the emphasis of TSV and further empasizes this mission through the art critique -- a fundamental social dialogue that balances the necessary solitary nature of independent studio rigor. Please see TSV's website to find out more about both the virtual and physical programming TSV offers.

She is currently living and working in Berlin where she served in 2012 -2013 as a Visiting Artist and Curator at Takt International Artist Residency where she conducts weekly art critiques and seminars for the artists in residence and curated them in group shows. Her expertise, scholarship and passion support and promote visual artists working in all mediums and career levels. In July 2011, She curated a group show in Washington D.C. at Addison Ripley Fine Art called "CultureScape" featuring the work of five emerging artists: Mei Mei Chang, Bridget Sue Lambert, Lisa Blas, Hedieh Ilchi and Elise Richman. She recently curated "Outside In" this past October 2012, a site specific installation that was on view this past October in Berlin executed by two Washington D.C. artists Megan Muller and Sam Scharf.

As an artist, Isabel has been showing her work internationally since 1999.  Her work is a part of numerous private and public collections including the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, the permanent collections of the US Embassies in Bulgaria, Kazakhtsan and Nepal to name a few. Her work has been shown at the McLean Project for the Arts, Arlington Art Center, Maryland Art Place, the Katzen Arts Center, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art and has been the subject of group and solo shows in Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia and New York. She was featured in New American Paintings in 2004 and 2006 and was awarded a Fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2008, 2009 and 2011 with support from the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation for 2009. Manalo's work is included in the Drawing Center and White Columns curated artist registries.

Isabel received her MFA in Painting from Yale University, a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

My work has become more about the hand and less about the image. It is less about the abstraction of space but rather the abstraction of language and the  image of the Baybayin as manifest with thread and collage on different surfaces of paper. Using the pre-colonial alphabet from the Philippines -- called the Baybayin -- is a way to communicate my deepest thoughts through the written word, yet in a script that isn’t used anymore nor can be read or necessarily accessed by the general public. While it is clearly a written form, the process becomes visual for me.
 
I stitch the calligraphic lines as if I was stitching a wound. The process of sewing reminds me of my mother and the endless hours she spent sewing dresses for my sisters and myself. It was a large part of her identity and by including the sewing; it makes her present in this body of work almost akin to painting a narrative portrait of her.
 
Paint becomes blisters; photographs are cut and glued like pretty Band-Aids we see at the local drug stores. It resolves into a tactile discomfort of thread, knots, paint boils and cut paper that evokes a life that is uncontrolled, but hoping to be beautiful, somehow. Stitching the Seam,the title of my solo show at the Orlando Museum of Art that opened on March 6, 2014, refers to the multitude of feelings that connect me to the minutiae of everyday, to the tragic and spectacular of the bigger planet we endeavor to call home.

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  • Born: USA
  • Based: Berlin, Germany
  • Also Based in: Washington, DC, USA

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