Maria Dumlao

Maria Dumlao (born in Manila, Philippines ) is an American visual artist who works in a variety of media, including performance, photography, sound, and video, installation, and artist books. She has shown in New York, Philadelphia, Honolulu, and internationally in London, Madrid, Oslo, Utrecht, Barcelona, Vancouver, and Tokyo.

She is also a member of the Brainstormers, a group of women artists whose performances address gender inequity in the American art world. They are known for their piece near the entrance of P.S.1 during the Greater New York show in 2005.

Currently a member of the faculty at Bucks County Community College in Newtown, Pennsylvania, she resides and works in Philadelphia.

Background
She grew up in Pasig, Metro Manila in the Philippines and immigrated to the United States at age 13. She attended the Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in both Studio Art and in Art History in 1994. She then attended Hunter College's Master of Fine Arts program, graduating in 2003. While there, she attended Hunter's exchange program in Berlin at the Universität der Künste.

Early career
She worked actively and closely with the activist group GABRIELA Network in New York and the Philippines from around 1995 until 2000 (before it became a party), the end of undergraduate and the beginning of graduate school. She designed a few of the graphics for their campaigns and made a series of documentary photo-essays.

Reframing scenes from American cinema
Her 2004 video, Loom, is made up of interior scenes in famous American horror films from which people are absent. The program from an exhibition in which the work was included states "An abstract play of shadows seems both to echo the notion of film-flicker and also to posit some hidden form of human activity just outside the still frame." A copy of the work is in Brooklyn's Momenta gallery's video library.

Verging, dating from 2004-2005, involves cinematic images where one lone woman is present. It is an installation of 80 images flashed for nine seconds each from a slide projector, and was shown at Art in General in New York City.

For her 2010 piece Untitled (Rocky), Dumlao edited Sylvester Stallone out of iconic scenes from Rocky, underscoring Philadelphia as a setting.

Brainstormers
In 2005, with fellow Hunter MFA graduates, Danielle Mysliwiec, Elaine Kaufmann, Anne Polashenski, and Jane Johnston (who has since left the group) and four volunteers, Dumlao stood outside of P.S.1's entrance in a colorful curly wig with her face painted and stood pointing at the institution, for six hours. Point was a performance that called attention to the fact of the all-important exhibition's roster of artists being over two-thirds male. The group drew on earlier feminist art protestors the Guerrilla Girls, with whom they have collaborated.

In 2005, the Brainstormers performed again, in a piece called How Good Are You? outside the entrance to the Armory Show, dressed in lab coats, handing out color-coded research about the levels of representation of women artists in Chelsea art galleries. In 2008, they did a collaborative work with the Guerilla Girls at the Bronx Museum of Art.

Also in 2008, they protested in the street in Chelsea, New York, at the corner of West 24th Stree and 10th Avenue, getting passers-by to fill in mad lib-style postcards protesting about the lack of female representation in art galleries. In 2009 they exhibited at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Center, New York.

Of the group's work, Dumlao has said "Our work and actions are meant to inform, excite and provoke people in a dialogue. We encourage them to act on their own terms."

Residencies
2009 Artist in Residence, free103point9's Wave Farm, Acra, New York 2006 Artist in Residence, Experimental Television Center, Owego, New York 2003 Artist in Residence, Experimental Television Center