UP Vargas Museum

UP Vargas Museum This is the official page of Vargas Museum, the modern and contemporary art museum in UP. The Ground Floor. This is the main access to the building.

The museum is open every Tuesday to Saturday, from 9 am to 5 pm, except holidays. THE MUSEUM

The building of the museum was formally inaugurated in 1987, almost nine years after Mr. Vargas donated his collection to the University of the Philippines. The multi-level architecture was designed to support the museum’s diverse functions. It has a bookshop and space for the museum’s community arts prog

ram and a café for the museum and the university’s visitors. Its front lobby serves as the main reception area with stairs leading to the other levels of the structure. This floor features areas for changing exhibitions. The Lobby, hosts temporary exhibitions, lectures, meet-the-artist sessions, book launch, poetry readings and music recitals and concerts. Another area designated for changing displays on the west side of the building is the West Wing Gallery that stretches the whole area of the western portion and also covers the back side of the building. This area is designated for major solo exhibitions or group shows of contemporary artists. The Second Floor. Visitors will find on this floor The Main Gallery of the museum where the exhibit of the permanent art collection is displayed. On occasion it hosts special exhibitions such as those touring from abroad or local collections that require ideal conditions for display. The Third Floor. This level houses the archives, library and the Vargas memorabilia. It also has an exhibition space called The North Wing Gallery where photography and mostly contemporary art are exhibited. The South Wing Gallery holds thematic exhibitions of the permanent art and archival collections. Technical and artistic support services personnel – curator, researcher, specialist and staff – also hold office in this level. The Basement. This is the Vargas Museum’s activity center where workshops and community arts programs are held.

20/12/2025

Thank you for visiting us and joining our exhibition receptions, events, and programs this 2025. We look forward to welcoming you to the UP Vargas Museum next year!

The UP Vargas Museum celebrates the life of Filipino artist Antipas Delotavo, whose social realist paintings are charact...
18/12/2025

The UP Vargas Museum celebrates the life of Filipino artist Antipas Delotavo, whose social realist paintings are characterized by sharply delineated figuration against distinctly placed spaces. His life-like figures appear and move tenaciously against pictorial ground, whose elements he either fragments or obscures. His 2015 oil-on-canvas paintings, ‘Ganito Nuon’ (As Before) and ‘Ganito Ngayon’ (At Present), for example, depict figures hovering in mid-stance. We can historically situate them only through their garb and the accoutrements that are appendages to their bodies— a cane, a hat, a turban, or a clay jar balanced on the head. Other signifiers of place are missing; only hieratic scale allows us to perceive proximity and distance on a two-dimensional ground. These were shown alongside a sprawling historical painting referencing the Basi Revolt in his solo exhibition ‘Agos’ (Flow) at the UP Vargas Museum in 2016.

‘Agos sa Ilog Bantaoay’ depicts a surge of revolutionaries towards the right of the pictorial frame. It is a scene from the Basi Revolt, also known as the Ambaristo Revolt, which took place in September 1807 in the present-day town of Piddig, Ilocos Norte. The revolt was led by Pedro Mateo and Salarogo Ambaristo, protesting Spanish colonial restrictions on the production and sale of basi, a traditional sugarcane wine. The event is memorialized in a series of paintings by Esteban Villanueva and the Basi Revolt Monument along Piddig’s Highway. While Delotavo’s painting references the short-lived revolt, its composition powerfully evokes the mural Filipino Struggles Through History by Carlos Francisco. Both paintings are charged with the volatile temper of action in the frenzy of battle. Yet what defines Delotavo’s piece is its upper section, near the edge of its top border that depicts figures and objects that point to a turbulent period in Spain’s history that was the Peninsula War.

In outlining several inspirations for the project ‘Agos,’ Antipas ‘Biboy’ Delotavo de-stabilises the art-historical category of painting. Patrick Flores, former curator of the museum, describes this succinctly: “…the category of painting becomes unstable and potentially incendiary….become [-ing] a basis of chronicle, portent and allegory.” An installation from the same exhibition included an empty canvas whose surface bears an image of a lone butterfly. Monochrome images of war's deadly machinery surround it. It is believed that butterflies are the souls of the dead, visiting the realm of the living. Biboy Delotavo is now a visitor to this fraught plane of victories and struggles, which he depicted with great eloquence and acuity in his art.
[Tessa Maria Guazon]

We thank our partners and collaborators this year for making the UP Vargas Museum a vibrant and energetic place for gath...
17/12/2025

We thank our partners and collaborators this year for making the UP Vargas Museum a vibrant and energetic place for gathering. We strive hard to bring you exhibitions and public programs that are inspiring and instructive.

We look forward to having you join us at our exhibition receptions, our Vargas After-Hours, Raket sa Vargas, Family Day events, and activities related to our Gardens and Homesteads project. A happy holiday season to everyone!

Photo credits Veejay Villafranca

16/12/2025

Our museum curator Tessa Maria Guazon invites you to our end of year exhibition, Notes for Tomorrow, and exhibition in collaboration with ICI (Independent Curators International).

Notes for Tomorrow is on view at the 1/F West Wing Gallery of the UP Vargas Museum from 16 December 2025 to 7 March 2026.

15/12/2025

We will end the year with the opening of the exhibition Notes for Tomorrow, organized by Independent Curators International (ICI). The UP Vargas Museum hosts the exhibition’s first iteration in Southeast Asia, which opens on 16 December 2025, which gathered works selected by 30 curators from 25 countries. The chosen artworks collectively consider issues that arose in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. The ripples caused by the cultural shifts felt during that time continue to be felt at present, and there remains a need to turn to a network of overlapping solutions.

Notes for Tomorrow will be on view at the 1/F West Wing Gallery of the UP Vargas Museum from 16 December 2025 to 7 March 2026.


Notes for Tomorrow In collaboration with Independent Curators International (ICI) 16 December 2025 to 07 March 2026 UP V...
10/12/2025

Notes for Tomorrow
In collaboration with Independent Curators International (ICI)
16 December 2025 to 07 March 2026
UP Vargas Museum 1/F Galleries

Exhibition preview on 16 December 2025, 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM
at the UP Vargas Museum, West Wing Gallery

'Notes for Tomorrow' features artworks from around the world brought together in 2020 to reflect on a new global reality ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic. Coming out of a moment where collective crisis had to be managed through collective care, Independent Curators International (ICI) turned to 30 curators from 25 countries to consider the issues that have come to the fore in the pandemic’s aftermath, asking each of them to share one artwork that they believe is vital to be seen today.

The UP Vargas Museum hosts the exhibition’s first iteration in Southeast Asia, opening on 16 December 2025, bringing together works across various geographies, narratives, and disciplines that stray from the colonial canon. The selected artists present works that question monumentality and seek the wisdom of localities. In this necessary moment of cultural transition, each work acts as a source of inspiration from the recent past toward new futures. Rather than proposing a single path forward, the artworks in Notes for Tomorrow present a network of overlapping solutions.

___

Artists of 'Notes for Tomorrow': Madiha Aijaz, Ernesto Bautista, Maeve Brennan, Vajiko Chachkhiani, Luke Luokun Cheng, A Liberated Library for Education, Inspiration, and Action, Nothando Chiwanga, Shezad Dawood, Demian DinéYazhi', Cao Guimarães, Ilana Harris-Babou, Rei Hayama, Amrita Hepi, INVASORIX, Tamás Kaszás, Ali Kazma, David Lozano, Mona Marzouk, Joiri Minaya, Peter Morin, Omehen, Daniela Ortiz, Kristina Kay Robinson, Luiz Roque, Mark Salvatus, Ibrahima Thiam, u/n multitude, Wayne Kaumualii Westlake, and Yan Shi

09/12/2025

We thank everyone who joined us for the second iteration of Retrato Raket sa Vargas! 📷🎄

Retrato Raket sa Vargas is in partnership with Silver Fine Art Prints, Fotobaryo, and Fotomoto PH. Featured merchandise and creative services by Bolo EDC, fiasfud, film4ever, Film Folk, Flint Photo Collective, Fotobaryo, Hottudoggu, Kombibrew, Mahiwaga Street, Meshi-Ya Hoshikao, Print Collective, SHAINE, Studio Balite, syfugoesgrainy, Raw and Untitled PH, UP Vargas Museum, and Yellow Door.

With projections by Fotomoto PH and DJ sets by IZE!, Thotsun, and Barrack Block.

November The museum welcomed participants in a macrame workshop, a collateral event for the Kalikasang Mahiwaga exhibit...
03/12/2025

November

The museum welcomed participants in a macrame workshop, a collateral event for the Kalikasang Mahiwaga exhibition; Ms. Lourdes Filomena Tabora and her family, kin of Jorge B. Vargas; artist-curators Red Nguyễn and Kha Le from Vietnam; and J-CAP delegates Miao-chen Huang (Taiwan) and Natsuki Kuroda (Japan).

We thank those who attended the opening reception for Mike Adrao’s exhibition ‘A Deafening Silence,’ and those who joined us for the roundtable ‘Publics in Curatorial Practice,’ with speakers Mayumi Hirano, Julius Redillas, and Jan Sunday. Our curator, Tessa Maria Guazon, together with artists Nathalie Dagmang and Alma Quinto, organized a gardening activity for their Southeast Asia Neighborhoods project with women’s communities from Escolta and San Mateo and their children.

Visit the UP Vargas Museum at the University of the Philippines Diliman Campus. We are open from Tuesday to Saturday, except holidays, from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.

[ADVISORY] The Vargas Museum's 3/F galleries will be closed for viewing from 3 December to 12 December 2025 due to insta...
03/12/2025

[ADVISORY]

The Vargas Museum's 3/F galleries will be closed for viewing from 3 December to 12 December 2025 due to installation and updating of CCTV cameras.

Drawing may have been our earliest exercise in free expression, with lines typically regarded as its foundation. Yet lin...
02/12/2025

Drawing may have been our earliest exercise in free expression, with lines typically regarded as its foundation. Yet lines almost disappear in Mike Adrao’s charcoal renderings on paper because they are armatures for detail, supporting the volumetric rendering of form. In a similar vein, lines take on a finely wrought and delicate character in his smaller ink studies, functioning like latticework that holds together the fragile elements of intricate forms. Lines amplify dimension and scale in his resin sculpture pieces, which appear like an insect or an ornament. Adrao’s use and activation of the line imply the provisional character of contemporary drawing.

This exhibition reiterates the themes that course through Adrao’s artistic practice— flagrant excess, imminent rupture, and inevitable ruin. He harnesses the stylistic canons of Western art history, represented by classical columns and baroque ornamentation, mobilizing visual elements that signify polarity and tension. He indicates an underlying subversion by presenting them on the verge of disintegration, overtaken by a tangle of arms, vines, guns, and similar objects whose crescendo soon collapses into chaos.

Drawings may manifest a thought or imaginative process, relying on the schema of rendering an invisible mechanism into form. Mike Adrao has a reverence for the craft, seeing the act of returning to the dexterous task of drawing as a necessary recourse. He coaxes imagery from his chosen mediums, which are ink and charcoal, conventionally regarded as stable, but are likewise given to motion, as they can flow and shift on their chosen ground and surface. The framing device for this suite of works, however, is silence— heavy, oppressive, and ominous. It insinuates complicity and harks back to unspoken fragments of the past, as well as a repudiation of a future whose very idea is a frightening prospect. Adrao skillfully tunes these atmospheres in his art, where presences appear on the cusp of being and nothingness. [Tessa Maria Guazon]

You may also access the translation of the text at https://bit.ly/MikeAdraoWallTextTranslation

Retrato Raket sa Vargasin partnership with Silver Fine Art Prints, Fotobaryo, and Fotomoto PH06 December 2025, from 10:0...
29/11/2025

Retrato Raket sa Vargas
in partnership with Silver Fine Art Prints, Fotobaryo, and Fotomoto PH
06 December 2025, from 10:00 AM to 9:00 PM

Meet our raketirz:
Bolo EDC
fiasfud
film4ever
Film Folk
Flint Photo Collective
Fotobaryo
Hottudoggu
Kombibrew
Mahiwaga Street
Meshi-Ya Hoshikao
Print Collective
SHAINE
Studio Balite
syfugoesgrainy
Raw and Untitled PH
UP Vargas Museum
Yellow Door

DJ set by:
Ize!
Thotsun
Barrack Block

Projections by:
Fotomoto PH

and a community Photography Swap!

Join us at the UP Vargas Museum for a day of art, music, food, coffee, and more at Raket sa Vargas—an art bazaar happening on 06 December 2025, Saturday, from 10:00 AM to 9:00 PM! This December’s Retrato Raket sa Vargas gathers the photography community once more for a day full of celebration, support, and thanksgiving. The bazaar will take place throughout the day, with a closing program from 7:00 PM onwards featuring projections from Fotomoto PH and music by DJs from the photography community.

"Raket," a Filipino slang word for side hustle or sideline, means a quick gig to earn money. It is evident in the art industry where it is commonplace to have jobs on the side to provide supplemental income; whether from selling merchandise or providing creative services parallel to one's passion. The Vargas Museum, a not-for-profit university museum, through the public program that is Raket sa Vargas recognizes the culture of side hustles among local artists and cultural workers and offers an opportunity for them to collectively share their works with the public.
Raket sa Vargas is a public program of the UP Vargas Museum exploring alternative economies. Check our socials on Facebook and Instagram for updates on our activities this December! Write the [email protected] for details and related information.


Address

Jorge B. Vargas Museum And Filipiniana Research Center, Roxas Avenue, University Of The Philippines, Diliman
Quezon City
1101

Opening Hours

Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm
Saturday 9am - 5pm

Telephone

+63289281927

Website

https://vargasmuseum.org/

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