Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Installation, Textiles
Website: katierevilla.net
Katie Revilla earned a B.A. in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley in 2017, graduating with Honors, the Lauren Krikorian Award, and a Certificate of Excellence in Sculpture. Based in Oakland, she spent her early career building a studio practice across the Bay Area, exhibiting at Southern Exposure, SOMArts, Root Division, Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, Worth Ryder Gallery, American Steel Studios, and B4BEL4B Gallery, and was awarded a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship in 2018.
Revilla went on to receive a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship in 2020 and attended the ACRE Residency in 2021, before completing an MFA in Art, Theory, and Practice at Northwestern University in 2023, where her thesis work was presented at the Block Museum of Art. She has since held additional residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, MASS MoCA, and SOMA Summer, and now maintains studios between the Bay Area and Chicago. Her work is held in the collections of the City of Oakland and the Block Museum of Art.
Her practice is rooted in the history of Filipino immigration to the Bay Area, drawn directly from her own family’s story of migration, labor, and racial passing across generations. That inheritance — and the gaps and silences within it — remains the throughline of her work even as her exhibition history has expanded beyond the region.
Revilla works primarily in textiles, sculpture, and installation, treating fabric as both material and metaphor for the way family narratives are woven, mended, and sometimes frayed across generations. Her materials are frequently autobiographical and ritualized: hair collected over two years, rust transferred onto silk, natural fiber dyes, found family photographs, and objects salvaged from relatives, including components pulled from her father’s damaged car. She has described her process as driven by repetition and ceremony, treating making as a way of marking time, change, and loss.
Thematically, her installations examine the Filipino diaspora and post-colonial inheritance, investigating how whiteness, cultural aphasia, and racial passing move through a single family line. Rather than presenting a single fixed narrative, she often stages her materials — objects, sound, scent, light — as fragments the viewer is left to speculate about and connect, building work that she has said is meant to protect her own interiority even as it invites the audience in.
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