Filipina artist wins U-S art competition

Toots Magsino

New York City-based painter, printmaker, and mixed media artist Toots Magsino has won the recently held national art competition sponsored by Carnegie Hall in Manhattan. Her abstract piece, “Unveil,” which won over some 800 entries from all over the U.S., was recently featured on the cover of the world-famous music hall's Playbill for June 2007.

Toots Magsino started exhibiting in Manila as a Magic Realist painter before going to New York City to attend The Art Students League of New York. She studied four years of painting and another four years of printmaking. She honed her multi-media craft, making use of water-based paint, collage (found objects), photo transfer, calligraphy, and frottage (rubbings). She has had 9 solo exhibitions in the US and Philippines and has participated internationally in more than 30 group shows.

Philippine art critic and former Ateneo Art Gallery director Emmanuel Eric Torres, says this of her art: “The world Toots conjures in her painting, printmaking, collage, and mixed-media practice serves as a diary of her inmost thoughts and feelings as a Filipina in a foreign land. Imagery consists of fragmentary, shadowy, ambiguous forms – autobiographic markers of her personal and artistic development in a global city. The agony of search for “my place in the sun” haunts her pictorial idiom as much as nostalgia, the daily need to be in touch with family and friends, and the passage of time.”

From now until October 5th, her works will be on view at the Grace Institute Gallery in a one-person exhibition entitled “Into My Little World”. An artist reception will be held in her honor on September 26, 2007 from 5:30-7:00 pm. Come and meet the artist who has been hailed by Ronnie Landfield, premier NY abstract artist and art critic as a “true alchemist who changes the mundane and the everyday into the profound and timeless.”

The Grace Institute is located at 1233 Second Avenue (between 64th and 65th) Gallery hours are M-F 8:30-9:00. For more information, please contact the curator, Jennifer Camara at (212) 832-7605 or visit www.tootsmagsino.com