MEDIUM RARE

What an awesome surprise, to land in the National Museum and discover that it’s no longer a museum piece but an elegant building that has aged graciously and acquired a rejuvenated life all its own, with 29 salons (or galleries) painted in modern bold colors, a network of handsome hallways, and glorious chandeliers looming over our bewitched and bewildered heads!
Is National Museum PH the new jewel in the crown? Since its latest renovation in 2015, it has not grown older but younger, bolder, fresher. All this I discovered on March 29, when the museum held a “soft opening” to kick off a year-long exhibition of the works of Virginia Ty-Navarro.
Initially, the Ty-Navarro show was meant to coincide with the celebration of International Women’s Month (March 2023), but it’s just as well that there are only 31 days in March. It’s not fair to label Virgie as a woman/lady/female artist, because VTN is beyond any stereotyping based on sex. Either she’s an artist or she’s not, and all the evidence points to her humanity as a painter, sculptor, jewelry maker, furniture innovator, even if she was not one to talk about Art with a capital A. Indeed, she hardly talked about her art or somebody else’s, for during the short time I knew her, her religion was not the ego of artists but God, Nature, and her work as a creator whose purpose was to bring joy to the beholder, joy ineffable.
Virgie made the monumental Our Lady of Peace on EDSA, but I remember her fondly for the little things she made that did not need to carry her name. You saw art in how she chopped her vegetables and prettily plated her dishes. You saw it by watching how her garden grew from one week to the next. My favorite object (no signature) is the brass sculpture of a fat naked lady sitting on an absent bench. The fun in owning that piece (six inches tall) is finding the lady a bench for her to sit on, as any flat surface in the house will do. The fun is in guessing who is she waiting for, what is she remembering? Most intriguing of all, is the lady an attempt at a self-portrait? Joy!