How one Filipino American artist influenced the work of a generation of others

Portrait of Carlos Villa in his studio, 1985. (Patricia Arian/Asian Art Museum, San Francisco)

In 1958, when the late Filipino American artist Carlos Villa was studying at the California School of Fine Arts, he asked one of his teachers where he could learn about other Filipino art.

"His teacher said to him there isn't any," said Mark Johnson, co-curator of Carlos Villa: Worlds in Collision, a retrospective of Villa's work at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.