Kundiman

March 20 - April 11, 2026

Charles Lahti, Francis Dravigny

“Kundiman” brings together the works of Francis Dravigny and Charles Lahti in a dialogue built from shared material and mutual trust. The title draws from the Filipino kundiman — a tradition of lyrical love songs defined by longing, devotion, and emotional depth — and frames this collaboration as something similarly intimate: two artists interlacing their gestures, histories, and sensibilities into a single surface. Like a kundiman performed by two voices, the works here are inseparable from the relationship that made them.

Two pianists sharing a single instrument — their movements crossing and completing each other — is what musicians call a "Four Hands" performance. That image takes literal form here. Lahti is a printmaker with a career spanning more than five decades, trained alongside masters of postwar American art and long embedded in the creative communities of New York's Lower East Side and Bushwick. His prints carry history, structure, and mark — images and narratives fixed in ink. Dravigny is a weaver, and in these collaborative works he takes Lahti's printed pieces into his textile practice, incorporating them alongside abaca and kimono fabric so that the loom becomes a place where two visual languages meet. The result is not a print displayed beside a textile, but something fused: narratives interlaced as much as fibers, four hands at work on every surface.

Brought together through their shared connections to the Philippines and its communities —they find in this method a form that is at once structurally exacting and quietly tender, one that echoes the longstanding textile traditions of Filipino craft while pulling them into new territory. Kundiman is an exhibition about collaboration, but more than that, it is about what remains when one artist's fixed marks are taken up by another's hands — transformed, held, and woven into something neither could have made alone.

Text by Marie Nelle Valmoria

Charles Lahti

Printmaker Charles Lahti has remained an influential presence in New York’s art community for over thirty years. He began his artistic training with Mary Abbott in Minnesota before moving to New York in 1977 to pursue a professional path in the visual arts, starting as a printer at Styria Studios. This role led him to collaborate with major figures in postwar American art, including Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, and LeRoy Neiman.
Lahti’s career has been defined by a strong commitment to collaboration and experimentation. Engaged with the relationship between art and community, he has explored emerging forms such as performance, graffiti, and multimedia art. His studios, first located on the Lower East Side and later in Bushwick, have served as important spaces for mentoring and artistic growth. His work has been widely exhibited across the United States and collected internationally.
Francis Dravigny

Francis Dravigny is a Cebu-based French textile artist whose practice primarily weaves abacá with discarded resin, loom spools, stacked bowls, and other industrial remnants to create monumental forms.
His explores cycles of consumption and renewal by merging traditional craft with contemporary assemblage, emphasizing the tactile dialogue between organic fiber and synthetic waste. The labor-intensive processes of binding, wrapping, and stacking constructs structures that resemble both ritualistic objects and architectural relics.

Selected Works

Francis Dravigny & Charles Lahti, Usahay (Sometimes), 2026, Paper and antique kimono stripped, 34 x 43 in (110 x 110 cm)

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Francis Dravigny & Charles Lahti, Mutya ng Pasig (Muse ng Pasig), 2026, Paper and antique kimono stripped, 34 x 43 in (110 x 110 cm)

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Francis Dravigny & Charles Lahti, Ohoy Alibangbang, 2026, Paper and antique kimono stripped, 34 x 43 in (110 x 110 cm)

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Francis Dravigny & Charles Lahti, Bituing Marikit, 2026, Canvas, Silkscreen, Acrylic, and Shibori Silk, 63 x 67 in (160 x 170.2 cm)

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Francis Dravigny & Charles Lahti, Salamat Sa Ala-ala, 2026, Canvas, Silkscreen, Acrylic, Kimono, 67 3/4 x 64 1/2 in (172 x 163.8 cm)

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Charles Lahti, Call-Cove, 2026, Acrylic, Fabric, collage on linen, stretched on aluminum, 31 x 24 in (78.7 x 61 cm)

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Charles Lahti, Call-Day, 2026, Acrylic, Fabric, collage on linen, stretched on Aluminum, 31 x 24 in (78.7 x 61 cm)

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Francis Dravigny, CEBUANO, 2026, Hand painting polyester spools , resin, Asian eating bowl, 12 x 12 x 57 in
(30.4 x 30.4 x 145 cm)

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Francis Dravigny, BAGOBO, 2026, Hand painting polyester spools , resin, Asian eating bowl, 12 x 12 x 51 in (30.4 x 30.4 x 132 cm)

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