Carina Evangelista returns to Oklahoma Contemporary after a stint in New York serving as deputy director and subsequently interim director at Asia Society Museum and its Global Artistic Programs. With 30 years of curatorial, education and publishing experience in the U.S. and the Philippines, she has worked on permanent collection exhibitions, retrospectives and projects shows at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), exhibitions for emerging and mid-career artists at the Delaware Contemporary (Wilmington) and modern and contemporary art exhibitions in Manila. She was editor of the Chuck Close Catalogue Raisonné at Artifex Press (now Cahiers d’Art Institute, New York).
During her earlier tenure at Oklahoma Contemporary in 2021, she oversaw a full calendar of exhibitions, featuring artists that included Chakaia Booker, Crystal Z Campbell, Maren Hassinger, Robert Montgomery, Howardena Pindell and Ed Ruscha.
A 2004-2005 Asian Cultural Council fellowship led to her sustained involvement in the arts in the Philippines. In 2015, a rock opera for which she wrote the libretto was staged by Ballet Philippines. In 2017, she organized Counterfeit Monochromes at MO_Space, tackling the political and psychological underpinnings of Philippine conceptualism. She began exhibiting as a visual artist in 2017 and was featured in the 2018 Manila biennale.
Carina majored in humanities at the University of the Philippines and did her graduate studies in art history at City College, City University of New York. Born in Manila among the "Martial Law Babies" who grew up under a repressive dictatorship, her faith abides in the power of freedom in creative expression and in the conviction that the arts are not merely formalist celebrations. What might wax lyrical or radical in art speaks to what warrants understanding or changing. Returning to Oklahoma is a continuation of her own transformation — becoming part of the cultural vein in the American heartland.
