BoyD Needs Your Help
A signature peasant movement artist is desperately unwell. Please help if you can.
‘Boy’ Dominguez/Journal of Peasant Studies
Federico Dominguez — BoyD — paints in bright, folksy, figure-crammed scenes. The palette is super-saturated. If you didn’t know that he’d been painting like this for decades, you might believe it’s early 2025 generative AI. Just like AI, the initial feeling is overwhelm before, as he noted in a terrific article by Alastair Iles, you start to see “there’s something wrong in the pictures.”
‘Boy’ Dominguez/Journal of Peasant Studies
A Mandaya artist from Davao Oriental, largely self-taught, three decades deep in the Concerned Artists of the Philippines, he has spent his life making it impossible to look away from peasant and Indigenous existence. His work has appeared everywhere from protest banners to the covers of the Journal of Peasant Studies. In Land Grabs, above, executives ride a bulldozer that strips fertile soil and a fish-filled stream, shoving smallholders and their animals out of frame. The remaining peasants picket the blade, refusing to move.
Perhaps my favourite of his images is this, from the Journal of Peasant Studies gallery
‘Boy’ Dominguez/Journal of Peasant Studies
It’s a bit of an outlier in his oeuvre: although the themes of capitalist destruction, exile, and resistance are all there, the texture of the soil and sea is unusually stylised, and the palette shifted a register towards a more organic turmeric. (It reminded me of another Indigenous tradition, of Gond art in India.) Dominguez is quoting a Mandaya textile tradition about which I recently learned: Dagmay. The Philippine Studies programme at SOAS in London has a particularly good site Mapping Philippine Material Culture, showcasing how these patterns feature in Mandaya weaving.
BoyD is unlikely to paint again. He has corticobasal degeneration, a rare neurodegenerative disease eating into his movement, his speech, his thinking. He has stage-three kidney disease and lost a kidney in 2021. He needs round-the-clock care his family cannot carry alone, in a country where health insurance reaches few working people. The cheapening of bodies and land that runs through every BoyD canvas has come for the man who painted them.
A loose international community of agrarian scholars, BoyD’s family, and the Filipijnengroep Nederland have opened a fund for his care. The goal is modest: €7,000. I’ve already put in. If you can add to it, please do: donate here. If you can’t, at least bear witness. A gallery of BoyD’s work is here. For the fuller story, read Alastair Iles’s portrait of him, open-access at the Journal of Peasant Studies.
In every BoyD painting the bulldozer is already being picketed. The figures don’t win, exactly, but they’re in permanent struggle. If you can, please help BoyD fight his last battle with the dignity he endowed his subjects.