Meet Queens, New York-based Gerardo “Ged” U. Merino, a Fil-American painter, printmaker, and mixed media artist who works with repurposed textiles, who never thought of becoming an artist, does not join art competitions, and yet has become a celebrated cross-cultural artist.
Born and raised in the Philippines, Merino’s inclination towards the arts was developed at an early age, thanks to his late parents. His creative mother Virgie repurposed, recycled, and repaired things that were just part of her daily life. She used various techniques to give old cotton pig feed sacks (from his father Johnny’s farm) new life, embroidering, dyeing, and sewing them to make pajamas. Ged loved to draw, so Johnny bought him art materials while Virgie took him to art classes.
In 1987, Ged finished his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the Philippine Women’s University. He found his calling as an apprentice to his teacher Manuel “Boy” Rodriguez Jr., the son of Manuel Rodriguez Sr., the “Father of Philippine Printmaking” and a multi-awarded artist who worked with textiles, and started to experiment with “collagraphs,” silkscreens, etching, and other techniques. In the same year, Ged was among the Top Five in the ASEAN On the Spot Painting Competition and he joined the delegation to the ASEAN Youth Painting Conference in Singapore. The next year, he was awarded the Jackson Pollock Memorial Scholarship to study at the Arts Student League of New York.
While studying, he apprenticed with Marcelino Rodriguez, Manuels’s brother, who worked on monoprints. After taking a printmaking class, Ged started experimenting, painting, and working with printmaking and textiles. He planned to stay in New York for a year but decided to stay when gallerists in Chicago and Soho decided to represent him. After living in New York City for nearly half of his lifetime, Ged has accumulated things and objects reminiscent of home.
Spending several years in Manila and working on projects triggered an immediate reconnection with his roots and culture, most strikingly the contrast of poverty versus waste. Eventually, materials discarded, forgotten, or left behind, incidentally or intentionally, by people became his focus and his subject matter— repurposing them into his artistic process, giving them a new life by wrapping them in recycled fabric and string, thereby changing their form or function. He has rubbed, hammered, and scratched textures from flattened soda cans, soda bottle caps, old canvas, leather, manhole covers, sacks, and other quotidian materials that can give life to his art, using these as part of the plates, or silkscreen them and stitch them onto the fabrics.
Always attracted to color, textures, and decorative details of fabrics, Ged has described working with textiles as an adventure. His process is spontaneous, intuitive, and improvisational. Though more of an abstractionist, he also likes working with different materials. He basically started off as a printmaker then started to paint when he was in New York. Ged is currently working on textile-based works augmented by painting, printmaking, and sculpture, a medium that is not much explored yet. His work has been shown throughout New York, Chicago, and the Philippines.
On September 21, 2011, he, with his Colombian wife Carolina Morales (from Bogota), launched the Filipino-centric and cross-cultural Bliss on Bliss Art Projects, an alternative art space in Sunnyside, New York, where emerging, mid-career, and established contemporary artists can create and exhibit their works and interact freely with guests in an intimate space. Lately, he divides his time between Manila, Bogota, and New York City.
Ged collaborated with Aze Ong, a Manila-based visual and performance artist who creates and performs with her artworks that combine crochet with metal, wood, fibers, and semi-precious stones for the GedAze Project, a year-long collaboration exploring the medium of textile in expressing their art.
They exhibited in a group show at The Drawing Room Contemporary Art (Manila) called “Common Threads.” In October 2016, they launched “The GedAze Project” with a show at Bliss on Bliss Art. In 2017, they had five collaborative shows, four in Manila and, last September 16-October 28, at Topaz Arts New York entitled “Open Threads.” On February 17, 2019, he was back in Manila for his “Kuwentong Kutsero” exhibit at the Museo de San Ignacio in Intramuros.
In 2021, Ged, together with curator Virlana Tkacz, founding director of Yara Arts Group, and poet Olena Jennings, founder of Poets of Queens, organized “Threads,” a transnational traveling exhibit of textile artists and poets from Bogota, New York, Russia (Nadenka Art Group), Ukraine and the Philippines. A dialogue between image and poetry was exhibited in Bogota with curator Alejandra Fonseca, New York, and Manila with curator Carlos Quijon, Jr. His latest exhibit “Algun Dia Todo Esto Tendra Sentido” (Some Day This Will All Make Sense), a photograph-based work on synthetic textile with yarns, machine stitch, and repurposed textiles, started in Bogota last November 20, 2020, before traveling to Manila (September 11-October 2, 2021) and New York City then back to Bogota (November 27, 2021-January 29, 2022).
Image credits: Gerardo Merino