2025 NEDDY FINALIST IN OPEN MEDIUM
“2025 Neddy Finalist in Open Medium
Romson Regarde Bustillo
Born on the island of Mindanao, the Philippines, Romson Regarde Bustillo is a Seattle based artist. Carving his own path, Bustillo integrates an interdisciplinary practice with a mixed media printmaking foundation. Early mentors include mixed media artist Marita Dingus and the late painter Drake Deknatel.
He was awarded the Seattle Print Arts Larry Sommers Art Fellowship in 2016. In 2017 he was co-recipient of the Garboil Grant, an award that considers artists “…engaging audiences outside the aesthetic industrial complex.” He is the recipient of an Artist Trust Fellowship (2019) and the Artist Trust Artist Innovator Award (2021). He received a Northwest Film Forum Collective Power Fund Award in 2022 in "New Works" category. Awarded residencies include Bali Purnati Indonesia (2020), AADK Spain (2021), Museum of Glass (2022), Pilchuck (2023), and JackStraw (2024). His most recent public artwork is “Bahandi sa mga tao,” a permanent monumental exterior enamel on glass wall installation for the Seattle Convention Center.
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I make art to claim presence, to revisit truths, and to break constructed designations of place. I question and examine how place, context, and various cues modify, enhance, and divert meanings. The intent being to encourage viewer-participants to revisit how they and others interpret certain references based on inherited knowledge, lived experiences, and notions of “privilege”.
Through the studio process and the interplay of research, artworks, community collaborations, and interventions I introduce “players,” create spaces, and provide “script” while reserving room for personal and collective interpretation. Tradition(s)—repeated truths, and revolutionary—evolving truths, both play out in my art. I let these components interact/collide/integrate, blurring boundaries between art making, the artist role, spaces, and audiences.
Originating from Mindanao, the Philippines—a multi-ethnic, multi-faith island—my family immigrated to Seattle in the late ’70s, joining relatives already rooted there as a result of the Philippines’ colonial history with the United States. Raised in South Seattle and the Central District, I grew up in historically Black, immigrant, and working-class communities shaped by redlining and later impacted by gentrification. This layered cultural foundation, along with extensive research travels across the U.S., Southeast Asia, Latin America, Europe, and Africa, informs my art practice…”