Pittsburgh Review of Books—Ryan Frigillana at Silver Eye
Interview with Leo Hsu
October 29, 2026
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“Leo Hsu: In Tears, Blood, Sweat, currently on view at Silver Eye Center for Photography, we encounter work from three projects, made over eight years. Across these projects, you explore who you are, what matters to you, and what has shaped both your personal experience and also broader immigrant and Filipino American experiences. You recognize the power of visual culture and also see art as a tool for subverting and critiquing it, and you recognize making pictures as a way of asserting agency, intention, and critique.
It seems that the book form holds a special significance for you, offering a way to bring your work together. Let’s explore how you think about images, their relationship to one another, and how they come together as books. We’ll discuss three of your books, considering both the projects they present and the books themselves as art objects.”
Musée Magazine—Tears, Blood, Sweat: Ryan Frigillana | Silver Eye Center for Photography
Exhibition Review by AnnaRose Goldwitz
October 27, 2026
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“The result is an exhibition that feels at once intimate and expansive. Frigillana's greatest strength lies in his ability to begin with highly specific experiences—his mother, family photographs, food, religious imagery, domestic interiors—and allow them to open onto much larger questions. In Tears, Blood, Sweat, belonging is never presented as a fixed destination. It is something repeatedly assembled from memory, labor, faith, family, and image: a structure that, like the house of cards in The House They Built, may be fragile, but remains worth building.”
Lenscratch—Ryan Frigillana: Tears, Blood, Sweat
Interview with Helen Trompeteler
October 24, 2026
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“Co-curated by Helen Trompeteler and Leo Hsu, the exhibition at Silver Eye Center of Photography, brings together three interconnected bodies of work that explore displacement, belonging, and memory through distinct photographic strategies. Helen Trompeteler recently spoke with Ryan about the experiences, ideas, and questions that connect these projects. Tears, Blood, Sweat continues through November 7, 2026.
An interview with Helen Trompeteler and Ryan Frigillana follows.”
ALL ABOUT PHOTO.COM—Ryan Frigillana: Tears, Blood, Sweat
Exhibition Feature
2026
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“Ryan Frigillana: Tears, Blood, Sweat at Silver Eye Center for Photography brings faith, migration and labor into the same frame, where they remain uneasy, personal and deeply political. On view from Aug. 27 through Nov. 7, 2026, the exhibition draws from Frigillana’s experience as a first-generation Filipino American to examine how family history and inherited belief systems shape the idea of belonging.”
PhotoBook Journal—Ryan Frigillana – PATMOS
Book review by Gerhard Clausing
October, 2025
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“Ultimately, PATMOS represents both a warning and a prayer. In a world where apocalypse is a nightly broadcast, in a cathedral of spectacle, what revelations remain unseen? Frigillana’s answer is neither despair nor redemption, but clarity – a momentary recognition of the illusions confronting us. In its intensity and invention, PATMOS deserves a special place among the most urgent photobooks of recent years, a testament to the power of photography – not just to record, but to evoke and let you judge for yourself. PATMOS invites a reshuffling, a fresh interpretation, to rediscover fundamental meanings in all that digital noise.”
Baltimore Beat—HOME IS A MEMORY
review of “What They Left Us”, Group Exhibition, Baltimore, MD. Curated by Ciarra K. Walters & Anna Divinagracia. Words by Rejjia Camphor.
July 15, 2025
Installation photos by Vivian Doering.
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“Walters also gave me some insight into some of the works of other artists’ who weren’t at the opening. She told me about Ryan Frigillana, whose archival photographs “Pamana” and “The Home They Built” (2022) both display a family portrait of a man and woman holding hands in front of a building with multiple sack bags behind them. Rice — which scattered grains of are depicted lying across a scrapbook page in a binder in “Pamana” — played a huge role in supporting Frigillana’s family and education. “The Home They Built” showcases a house of red-patterned playing cards stacked into a pyramid atop of a red-and-white checkered tablecloth. What makes this piece clever is that one of the base cards has been replaced by the family photograph, speaking to how ancestral labor and presence were foundational in the artist’s present-day success. It echoes not only legacy, but the quiet balancing act of care and memory.”
Portland Monthly—Photos of the Filipinx Diaspora, Then and Now
Manong exhibition Feature by Matthew Trueherz
October 10, 2024
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“My mother used the camera to memorialize and affirm her faith in the American Dream,” Ryan Frigillana writes in the press release for Manong, his photo show currently at Blue Sky Gallery (through November 2). Hazy traces of memorial show up in Frigillana’s images, too. They’re quite literally in dialogue with his mother’s photos; some of the most affecting pictures are in fact photos of her photos, a juxtaposition that casts an unmissable sense of inheritance over the show.
NYC Photo Community—Ryan Frigillana
Interview with James Prochnik
2022
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“I first came across Ryan Frigillana’s work this past spring when one of his images of the Orchid Show at the New York Botanical Garden was published as the ‘Go opener’ in the New Yorker magazine. It was a dazzling photo of mirrors and orchids that showed me the beauty of nature - of flowers - presented in a new, fresh way, as were the outtakes he shared on his Instagram. Looking up Ryan’s website and Instagram, I was rewarded with more photos showing his rich sensitivity to nature along with intimate and incisive explorations of family, migration, and identity. The connections between family and nature are often explicit in his work and made me consider the idea of family as ecosystem - and what it can mean to move people born or raised in one environment to another. While we can all thrive in a new environment, the initial months and years of displacement can often prove difficult. When we have at last made a flourishing life in a new place, where does that thing inside us go that still misses the soil where roots first grew?”
A Portrait of the Artist—Soft Covers and Hard Lines
Interview with Ava Williams
July 12, 2021
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Ryan Frigillana on the photobooks, the unexpected photo, and connecting with yourself through art.
“If I was ever asked to name someone who has a clear and visible passion for what they do, Ryan Frigillana would be the first and only name to come out of my mouth. I have talked a lot about how it is very hard for me to truly feel moved by images because content is pushed out at such high rates I get overwhelmed and nearly numbed to it all. However, there has never been a time where Ryan hasn’t moved me in some way. Either with his clear passion for what he does or his excitement for the people who are really making art. He never misses a beat in my book. Which is why any time he creates anything I am ready to like, share, or buy whatever he is putting out to the world. As we speak his book Visions of Eden is out on display in my room. It is the only photobook I leave out for people to look at.”
Nope Fun—Interview #494: Ryan Frigillana
Interview with Lee Chang Ming
2021
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“Ryan Frigillana is a Philippine-born lens-based artist living and working in New York. His work focuses on the fluidity of memory, intimacy, family identity, and visual culture, largely filtered through the lens of race and immigration. Embracing its plasticity, Frigillana explores photography’s relationship to context as a catalyst for thematic dialogue.
His first monograph, Visions of Eden, was published as two editions in 2020, and is held in the library collections of the MoMA, Getty Research Institute, and Smithsonian among others.
We spoke to find out more about Visions of Eden, his love for photobooks, and photography as a medium for introspection.”
Cumulus Photo—Visions of Eden
Interview with Jamie Ho
September 2020
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Originally published on Cumulus Photo.
Humble Arts Foundation—Visions of Eden and the american dream
Interview with Jon Feinstein
September, 2020
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“New York-based photographer and writer Ryan Frigillana sequences his own photographs among archival family photos, video stills, letters from his grandparents in the Philippines, and pages from illustrated children's Bible storybooks to understand his complicated relationship with religion and the American Dream.”