A valuable resource for students of art and art history, this book is the fruit of two decades of research and association with social realists and other protest and in revolutionary artists. Guillermo goes back to the origins of protest art in the 19th century and pursues it to its full flourishing in the Marcos regime and its variations during the Aquino administration. It also projects the trajectory of art into the future as new issues emerge to engage the political artist.

Acquiring Eyes directs incisive but at the same time admiring attention to H. R. Ocampo, Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal, and Emmanuel Garibay--four masters, the original and complex visuality of whose genre-specific efforts to parlay Philippine social dynamics into visual practices of engagement, struggle, and transcendence have produced for each of them a much-deserved and committed local following.