Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Installation, Textiles, Collage, Painting, Printmaking
Website: monicacanilao.com
Monica Canilao was born in 1984 in Redwood City, California, into a family with deep roots in the region: her father, a carpenter, immigrated to the United States from the Philippines, while her mother’s family has lived in the Bay Area since the 1800s. She earned a BFA in Illustration from California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in Oakland in 2005, and has lived and worked in Oakland ever since.
Canilao’s career grew out of the Bay Area’s DIY, mural, and warehouse gallery scenes, and her work has since been shown at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Luggage Store Gallery, and Chandran Gallery in San Francisco, Deitch Projects in New York, Black Rat Press in London, and Miami’s Scope Art Fair, among many other venues in the U.S. and abroad. In 2013 she received the Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, and in 2021 was a top finalist for an Artadia award. She has completed public art and mural projects across the country and internationally, including a food-stand mural for the Painted Desert Project on the Navajo Nation reservation and the Djerba Hood mural project in Tunisia, and her work has been featured through the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies program. In 2026 she presented the site-specific installation Vessels for Healing and Transmuting Grief at FOR-SITE Foundation’s Guardhouse space at Fort Mason in San Francisco.
Canilao builds large-scale sculptures, installations, and wearable and performance pieces from salvaged and found materials — weathered fabric, discarded photographs, copper, feathers, beadwork, and reclaimed wood — alongside more intimate flat work in painting, drawing, printmaking, and book making. She describes her practice as a way of generating “a living history,” treating the act of mending and repurposing broken-down materials as a stand-in for mutual aid and resourcefulness within marginalized and immigrant communities. Recurring themes include memory, decay, ancestry, and displacement; much of her recent work, including reliquary altars and embellished found portraits, engages directly with grief, migration, and colonization. She frequently collaborates, including on an ongoing project with fellow artist Xara Thustra under the shared name MCXT, and regularly leads community workshops and public murals that draw local residents directly into the making process.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.