History & Trajectory

Invoking heritage and iconography, the Bulwagan ng Dangal University Heritage Museum has played host to various exhibitions and events since 2009. In the catalogue of its first show, Pag-Asa ng Bayan, former curator and director Prof. Rubén D. F. Defeo shares how the museum’s name was taken from the second stanza of the UP anthem in Filipino, UP Naming Mahal.

In commemoration of the centennial of the university, the Bulwagan ng Dangal began construction in 2008, and was finished in 2009. Prof. Defeo states that: “The establishment of Bulwagan ng Dangal as a bulwark of art and culture in UP Diliman preserves the academic continuum of the obstinate and the creative, the concrete and the abstract, the global and the local.” The museum was created in order to become a repository for and a discursive space on UP heritage, stressing that the institution continuously transforms and is transformed. The structure’s integrity reflects this character of the institution, being situated in an austere yet elegant building that is also steeped in historical significance.

While the museum acts as a repository for some of the items in the University Art Collection as well as newly acquired works from alumni and professors at the College of Fine Arts, it is also being geared towards becoming an experimental space with an interdisciplinary slant. This has been expressed in Dr. Patrick Flores’ The Call of the Cellar (2009) in which he states: “It is more akin to a creative laboratory, interdisciplinary in orientation, open to the importuning of contemporary art, and always attuned to the experiments of artists and cultural workers from the gamut of instincts of the fine arts, humanities, anthropology, film, architecture, physics, education, economics, and so on.”

Its location within and beneath the university’s Gonzalez Hall (Main Library), a building and structure designed in the Modernist aesthetic, lends the museum an atmosphere of modern thought and intellectual integrity. It is a place of reflection and action, a confluence between the past and the present, historical records, archives and social and academic life in constant flux converging and conversing, creating potential and possibility.