Location: Kensington, CA
Medium: Sculpture, found objects, quilt, public art, installation
Website: mikgaspay.com
Mik Gaspay was born in 1976 in Quezon City, Philippines, and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine, settling in Palo Alto, California. He received a BFA in Illustration and Design from the California College of Arts and Crafts, and an MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2011. He has lived and worked in the Bay Area throughout his career, currently based in Kensington. In 2016 he was awarded a commission by the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco for a permanent public art installation — the Sunrise Mosaic — on the Portsmouth Square pedestrian bridge in San Francisco’s Chinatown. He has had a solo exhibition at Alter Space Gallery in San Francisco and has shown in group exhibitions at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, WhiteBox Gallery in New York, and the Art Gallery at the University of Hawaii in Hilo.
He is also a practicing curator, having organized the exhibition Spirited Probabilities at Southern Exposure in San Francisco. A recurring collaborator is his mother, May Gaspay (b. 1953, Cagayan, Philippines), a long-arm quilter with over forty years of traditional quilting experience; the two established a formal collaborative practice in 2020. In 2022–23, they were Warehouse Artists in Residence at Minnesota Street Project Foundation in San Francisco, where they developed Ong’s Boat, an installation honoring the experience of Mik’s father-in-law, who fled Vietnam at age fourteen.
Gaspay’s solo practice works primarily with found objects, painting, and sculpture, investigating the translated meanings of commonplace products and structures. He draws on the tension between functionality, purpose, and language — conjuring expressions fused from readymade signification, history, and uncertainty. His collaborative practice with May combines her mastery of traditional quilting with his conceptual training to produce large-scale quilted works and installations that reflect sites and objects of personal, familial, and cultural significance. The collaborative practice began in 2019 as a way to work through ideas of home and loss after a typhoon destroyed May’s childhood home in Enrile, Cagayan; it has since expanded to encompass broader explorations of migration, memory, and family history across the Filipino and Vietnamese diasporas.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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