Pintô Art Museum is an exhibition space and contemporary museum located in the Philippines’ historic pilgrimage city of Antipolo outside of Manila. The museum was founded in 2010 to publicly exhibit the art collection of Filipino neurologist and patron of the arts, Dr. Joven Cuanang. The museum (pintô means door in Filipino) was founded on the principle that art plays a diplomatic role in bridging cultural gaps. Dr. Cuanang began collecting in the spirit of local artistic patronage in the late 1980s when he championed a revolutionary Filipino artist collective, The Salingpusa, through dedicated connoisseurship and acquisitions. The political movements associated with the People Power Revolution in 1986 and the fall of the Marcos Regime ushered an era of creative expression and artistic exploration. Dr. Cuanang became a proponent for other practicing artists in the region and earned a reputation as a patron in the Filipino artistic community. The museum collection includes works by artists Elmer Borlongan, Mark Justiniani, Jose John Santos III, Emmanuel Garibay, Rodel Tapaya, Geraldine Javier, Marina Cruz, Joy Mallari and Antonio Leaño among others, whose ouvres compose a veritable record of the evolving contemporary cultural milieu. The Pintô Art Museum is one of the 25 most Instagrammed museums in the world (ArtNet). In the years leading up to 1986's People Power Revolution, a group of fine art students at the University of the Philippines in Manila formed a friendship that would reshape Filipino contemporary art for many years to come.  Determined to give talented students the opportunity to practice and grow, Professor of Painting Fernando Sena provided free supplies as part of an after-hours art workshop, creating a small collective of artists. In the excitement following the People Power Revolution, numerous self-directed initiatives emerged, mostly outside metro Manila; in Antipolo, an ecology foundation was established to preserve the local waterfalls, attracting the young artists for weekend painting sessions. “Salingpusa” is a Filipino idiom for kids who are too young to play rough, but too old to play at all. This is what the outsiders of the Filipino art scene called themselves. Through their work in the ecology foundation, the Salingpusas were introduced to Dr Cuanang, a physician who would host them for Sunday refreshments and drawing sessions in the gardens surrounding his weekend house in the hills of Antipolo. Learning of the struggles of these talented artists to find exhibition spaces, Dr Cuanang started to organize shows of their artistic production in his Silangan Gardens, now Pinto Art Museum. For their first show, Icons, in 1991, the artworks were hanged on clothes lines for the physician colleagues and friends from Manila. The second clothesline exhibition “Flora” was held later that year. With the growing attention for the innovative works of the Salingpusa, Dr Cuanang converted also his downtown Manila home into Boston Gallery, which immediately became the main catalyst of early contemporary art in the Philippines under the curation of Bobby Valenzuela. While the doctor kept building his career, the young artists made the Antipolo’s Silangan Gardens their headquarters, while several of them took up residence there for over a decade. They shared everything from meals, dramas, creation, love stories. In this relaxed and supportive environment, the artists cemented their brotherly friendships that would last up to today; here some of the Salingpusa dress up for a costume parade at the University of the Philippines. In their first years, the Salingpusa often practiced a form of interaction painting that was a carryover of lightning street murals of protest art. Like for “Karnabal”, a study was made from suggestion pitched by the individual artists, unified in a scaled composition, and then transferred on a larger scale.The Salingpusa completed “Karnabal” in 1992. One of the seminal works of contemporary Filipino art, it provides a metaphor of Philippine society as a carnival of competing powers and pawns, so powerfully expressive of the social tensions following the People Power Revolution. In this setting, the Salingpusa and Dr Cuanang helped draw the fledgling gallery’s activities and shows in Manila up until the late 90s. Above, some members of the group work on another collective mural for the annual Antipolo Maytime Arts Festival that they set up. With the attention of the public and praise of the critic, many of the artists of the original group started to win painting competitions, and receive some of the most prestigious art awards of their days. For their 15th year of Salingpusa in 2001, finally the Pinto Art Gallery was opened in the Silangan Gardens in Antipolo. Ten years later followed the Pinto Art Museum, the opening of Dr Cuanang’s collection to the public. Since their birth Pinto and Boston Gallery have brought to prominence 3 generations of Filipino contemporary visual artists. The aesthetic traditions represented in the collection trace their roots to the history of Spanish colonial occupation and reference the tenets of academic and religious art, yet demonstrate a markedly different stylistic and technical trajectory following the proliferation of modernism in the mid-twentieth century. Artworks in the foundation’s collection reflect personal investigations of modernist movements such as surrealism, expressionism, minimalism, social realism, and conceptual art. The works are, however, distinguished by an innately Filipino adherence to cultural identity and national history. Today, the Pintô Art Museum presents rotating exhibitions of the foundation’s collection and oversees an adjacent gallery space that continues to exhibit and promote contemporary Filipino artists. The museum is housed in a complex designed by artist Antonio Leaño and located within a two hectare botanical garden known as the Silangan Gardens, an ecological haven for the appreciation of local flora and fauna. Pintô Art Museum 1 Sierra Madre St. Grand Heights Rd, Antipolo, Rizal, Philippines (edited)