Florina H. Capistrano-Baker

Author photoFlorina H. Capistrano-Baker received the Ph.D, M.Phil, and M.A. from the Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University in the City of New York. She received the A.B. in Humanities (cum laude) from the University of the Philippines.

Dr. Capistrano-Baker was formerly museum director of the Ayala Museum (Philippines) where she is currently a consultant. Formerly research assistant for Oceania in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, she curated the exhibition “Divine Protection: Batak Art of North Sumatra” and authored the book Art of Island Southeast Asia: The Fred and Rita Richman Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1994).

Since 2000 her research has focused on Philippine specificities within a metanarrative of global exchange from the 10th -13th and 16th -19th centuries, investigating historical patterns and genealogies of forms, cultural hybridity,and renegotiated identities. Her book Philippine Ancestral Gold (NUS Press and Ayala Foundation, 2011) documents previously unpublished material suggesting early trade with neighbors in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea.

In 2014 she curated the permanent installation of the Pacific Gallery at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In 2015 she co-curated the exhibition “Philippine Gold: Treasures of Forgotten Kingdoms” at the Asia Society Museum in New York and wrote the exhibition catalogue of the same title (Asia Society, 2015).

She is co-editor of a forthcoming volume published by the Getty Research Institute, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Max-Planck-Institute), and Ayala Foundation entitled Transpacific Engagements: Trade, Translation, and Visual Culture of Entangled Empires,1565-1898. Her scholarly work has been supported by grants from Columbia University, Ford Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, American Association of University Women, Japan Foundation, Locsin Foundation, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Getty Research Institute.

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