Imelda Cajipe Endaya Becomes First Woman Named Philippine National Artist

Filipina artist Imelda Cajipe Endaya has received the Order of National Artists of the Philippines for Visual Arts, becoming at 77 the first woman ever awarded the distinction.

The Cultural Center of the Philippines and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts recommended the conferral, which took place on September 1. The government established the Order of National Artists in 1972 as the country's highest recognition for Filipinos who have made distinct and significant contributions to Philippine art.

The honor caps 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 addressed the struggles of Philippine society: gender and labor inequality, cultural identity, migration, globalization, and diasporic communities.

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

Her work enters the national honor roll with an institutional footprint spanning Asia. It is held in the collections of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the Philippine National Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Singapore, Metropolitan Museum Manila, the Okinawa Prefectural Museum, and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum.

Her 2022 retrospective at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, "Pagtutol at Pag-asa (Refusal and Hope)," affirmed her legacy in Philippine art. In 2026, her work reached international audiences at S.E.A. Focus in Singapore and Art Basel Hong Kong.

Endaya's practice extends well beyond the studio. She is a writer, curator, organizer, and informal educator. She cofounded Kasibulan, a collective of women artists, and Pananaw: Philippine Journal of Visual Arts. She belonged to 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 gratitude for the award and looked toward the future of feminist art in the Philippines. "People say I have just broken a glass ceiling," she said. "There should be more successful women artists after me."

Her declaration sets an agenda: fifty-four years after the Order of National Artists was founded, the recognition of its first woman artist in visual arts puts pressure on the institutions she has long organized within to make that ceiling stay broken.