The Art of Cece Carpio
January 30, 2026 thru
March 29, 2026
Through Indigenous oral traditions and narratives, both autobiographical and imagined, Cece Carpio’s first solo exhibition, Tabi Tabi Po: Come Out with the Spirits! You Are Welcome Here, highlights the power and necessity of storytelling. As a cultural, political, and relational practice shared across cultures, storytelling brings attention to the sacred and often overlooked spaces essential to understanding how all things come to be.
Carpio explores the themes and intersections of diverse cultural traditions, reconfiguring the folklore and mythologies of her upbringing. By colliding worlds and merging dimensions, radiating from ancestry, immigration, and gender-variant realities, Carpio shares universal stories of creation where beginnings, presents, and endings intermingle.
Tabi Tabi Po: Come Out with the Spirits! You Are Welcome Here delves into the sacred, becoming a collective space of reimagined creation stories that asks: What realities and stories about ourselves do we create when we exist between worlds and identities? What possibilities open before us?
About the Artist
Cece Carpio is visual artist, educator, and cultural strategist. She was born in Laguna, Philippines and migrated to San Francisco when she was twelve due to Martial Law. Her experience of cultural displacement, urban alienation, and possibility through creation inform my multidisciplinary artistic practice. Through murals, public space activations, and collaborative projects, she fuses folkloric forms, bold portraiture, and natural elements to make visible the invisible—memories, people, and ancestral relationships embedded in public space.
Cece’s work explores how ancestry contributes to our collective social well-being and how art can serve as a bridge between generations, cultures, and movements. Most recently, she served as artist-in-residence with Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, an urban Indigenous women-led land trust in the Bay Area. In collaboration with the Lisjan Ohlone Tribal Committee, Indigenous youth, and resident communities, she led public art initiatives focused on Indigenous placemaking across returned land. Together, they created visual land acknowledgments that reflect practices of rematriation, cultural revitalization, and land restoration—transforming urban landscapes into ceremonial spaces and living archives.
Her practice is rooted in the belief that art is a living force for social connection and transformation. It is a way to honor histories, build coalitions, and imagine liberatory futures. She has exhibited and produced work globally—from the Philippines to Guatemala, Cuba to Ireland—and have been recognized with fellowships and residencies, including the Rockwood Institute Fellowship for leaders in the arts, the NYFA Immigrant Artist Fellowship, and residencies with Café R.E.D & La Botica Espacio Cultural in Guatemala, KULARTS in San Francisco, Aurora Artist Residency Program and Space in the Philippines, YBCA 100, and most recently, the Constellation Fellowship with The Center for Cultural Power in part with California Arts Council.
Cece has served as a Public Art Advisor for the City of Oakland and worked as the Galleries Manager for the San Francisco Arts Commission. She is also a member of the artist collective Trust Your Struggle, through which she continues to teach, collaborate, and travel in pursuit of the perfect wall—one that holds memory, invites dialogue, and builds bridges toward justice.
Artwork credit: Cece Carpio, Anagolay, Acrylic on canvas, 2019.
