THE STEP UP: WORLDS IN COLLISION (2020-2022) is a research-based interdisciplinary artwork by Sherwin Rio and Lian Ladia that honors Carlos Villa’s (1936-2013) educational, curatorial, community-driven, and action-related archive as being the stepping blocks for a decolonized, a Filipinx/American, an Asian/American, a queer, and a multimodal art history.

Using the staircase in Villa’s San Francisco lofted studio-turned-archive as an architectural metaphor for his lasting intergenerational impact as an artist-educator, Rio and Ladia present reproductions, original photographs, and remixed compositions of Villa’s archive, artwork, and ephemera in copper plate form. Each framed plate is set to the height and dimension of one of Villa’s staircase steps, beginning with the step at eye-level of the average of age of the youngest person who can participate in Asian Art Museum’s (AAM) educational programs and ending well above any eye-level, at the top step where his loft would be. In conjunction with the context of Villa’s traveling retrospective as being the first major museum retrospective of a Filipinx-American artist ever, Rio and Ladia’s work honors Villa’s influence on previous, present, and future generations— acknowledging the groundwork he left behind, celebrating the work accomplished with the exhibition, and looking to the collective work ahead.

In connection to the copper plate installation, Rio and Ladia worked in collaboration with AAM educational staff Margaret Yee and Deborah Clearwaters in connecting a partnership to SOMA Pilipinas’ Galing Bata program, and contributing ideas and research for activities and syllabi through AAM’s educational programs.