Necessity of Being: Alfonso Ossorio's Critical Kapwa

Despite his critical role in the development of American Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Postwar Assemblage, gay Filipino-American artist Alfonso Ossorio remains at the margins of the historiography of these movements. Born in Manila, Philippines, the artist immigrated to the United States in 1930 where he lived and worked until his death in 1990 at his home city of East Hampton, New York. He is among the few Philippine-descended artists living in 20th-century America producing museum-collected works. Since America’s colonial occupation of the Philippines in the 19th-century, immigration has been increasing as a result of migrant labor, military recruitment, and economic exchange. However, the Philippine diaspora’s artistic contributions and visual identity before 1980 are largely under-researched in the United States. Queer artists of color, especially Filipinx-Americans, rarely feature in the dominant narratives of American modernity. Ossorio deeply inflected the trajectory of the American avant-garde yet his marginal place in the history demonstrates how art communities excluded queer and Philippine-American identities in the 20th-century during the development of two major American modernist movements. The scholarship has increased since Ossorio’s death in 1990 as a result of museum and gallery exhibitions. Previous writers focus on biographical description or contextualize Ossorio’s work within a broad movement category without considering Ossorio’s Filipino-American and gay identities in advanced detail from queer and critical race frameworks. These studies lack specific theoretical analysis around race, sexuality, and colonialism on Ossorio’s identity and his artistic communities. Through the analysis of his paintings and archival documents, this thesis argues that Ossorio’s negotiation of these intersecting minority categories is central to understanding his artistic production and his relationship to the American avant-garde. This research applies the current literature on queer theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory on Filipinx-American identity to Ossorio’s life and artwork. I center the work of Philippine psychologist Virgilio G. Enriquez with additions from Filipinx-American scholars Martin F. Manalansan IV, Vicente Rafael, Denise Cruz and American scholars art historian Richard Meyer and queer theorist Judith Butler when examining the artworks Untitled 1944 (1944) and Astonished Mother (1950) in the context of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism respectively.