Ric Gindap is Spruce Gallery’s founding and resident curator, shaping its exhibitions through a lifelong appetite for the strange emotional lives of images and objects. His curatorial approach is a way of looking: attentive to the private weather inside a body of work, the human story pressing through form, and the moment ambition, memory, desire, and beauty find themselves in the same room, behaving suspiciously well.
The fuller profile that follows traces the instincts, influences, obsessions, and occasional beautiful neuroses behind that way of seeing.
PROFILE
Photo by Chino Granda / Sine Haraya courtesy of PhilSME Magazine
RIC GINDAP
SPRUCE FOUNDING CURATOR
Ric Gindap’s curatorial practice has taken shape across museums, publishing, music, design, cultural writing, and artists’ development for more than three decades.
EARLY FORMATION
AT MUSEO ILOILO
His earliest training began at Museo Iloilo, where he spent six academic terms as an intern and museum volunteer under the mentorship of the late cultural advocate and curator Zafiro Agustin “Zaffy” L. Ledesma II.
In that capacity, he assisted with the preparation and mounting of exhibitions, including VISIONS (1992–1995), an annual presentation and celebration of Ilonggo artists that also served as a platform for discovering emerging talent.
Under the training and guidance of Administrative Officer Cynthia Tolones Peleña, he led visitors through the museum’s permanent collection of anthropological, cultural, and historical artifacts. Each tour involved placing objects within the wider life of the region: its rituals, beliefs, material culture, memory, and social history.
The experience became an early education in narrative, cultural framing, public interpretation, and the ways context and storytelling allow an audience to enter more deeply into what they are seeing.
INSIDE THE INDEPENDENT
ART SCENE
During the 1990s, Ric was among the founding members of Sining-X, a multidisciplinary art collective established by polymathic artist, writer, and filmmaker Elvert Bañares.
Its exchanges across visual art, cinema, writing, music, performance, and design brought him into close contact with Metro Manila’s independent art subculture and with creative communities whose practices moved freely across disciplines.
This period gave him an insider’s view of how art develops through conversation, collaboration, improvisation, and the shared energy of a scene.
FINDING AND DEVELOPING
NEW VOICES
Ric’s interest in identifying and developing emerging talent continued at Q89 Radio Iloilo, now 89.5 Home Radio.
During the station’s formative years, he conceptualized and managed its Student DJs initiative, recruiting representatives from colleges and universities across Iloilo City and developing them as on-air personalities and campus ambassadors.
The work covered talent discovery, mentoring, programming coordination, audience development, and the shaping of young personalities for public life. It established a thread that would continue across his later work in publishing, music, design, and contemporary art.
WRITING CULTURE
INTO VIEW
Writing became another enduring part of his practice. His work on art, design, and culture has appeared in ABS-CBN Interactive, Design Anthology, A Passion Thing, and Adobo Magazine.
Earlier in his career, he contributed reviews, columns, and features to publications including Blitz, 8to5, Pulp, MTV Ink, and Fudge. This long engagement with cultural writing sharpened his ability to enter the world of a creative work, locate the ideas carrying it, and give those ideas language and context.
Writing remains central to his curatorial process, from research and conversations with artists to exhibition texts, curatorial statements, and the wider cultural framing around each presentation.
MAGAZINES AS CULTURAL
PLATFORMS
Ric’s editorial career expanded through art direction, publication development, and magazine-making.
As co-founder of Sesame Seed Creatives, an affiliate magazine-publishing division of the Manila Bulletin Group, he worked alongside Oliver Kuy, Marvie Yap, and Annie Alejo, with the support and encouragement of Manila Bulletin executive Emilio “Emil” Yap III.
Sesame Seed developed a portfolio of progressive magazines including Fudge, Wedding Essentials, Imagine, Stella, Hipp, and Garage. As Creative and Design Director of Fudge, Ric helped shape its visual and editorial character through publication concepts, cover development, feature framing, cultural research, visual direction, and talent discovery.
He was also the launch art director for ABS-CBN Publishing’s MetroActive and Metro HIM.
MetroActive was devoted to adventure, active exploration, outdoor pursuits, adventure sports, and experience-driven travel. Metro HIM, under editor Carlo Tadiar, documented the emergence of the metrosexual lifestyle and the changing relationship of urban men with fashion, grooming, design, leisure, and self-presentation.
Both titles required an alert reading of contemporary behavior and the ability to turn evolving lifestyles into distinct editorial and visual worlds.
Ric later launched, edited, and creatively directed Monday Magazine, a groundbreaking Philippine publication on corporate culture, consumerism, and lifestyle for upwardly mobile urban professionals.
It followed the ambitions, working lives, habits, interests, and aspirations of a new professional class, bringing business, design, style, travel, consumption, and contemporary city life into one editorial world.
Across Fudge, MetroActive, Metro HIM, Memo, Monday, Slice, and other publications, magazine-making became part of Ric’s curatorial vocabulary.
It taught him how to read movements while they were still taking shape, place different voices in meaningful relation, and guide an audience through images and ideas with pace, hierarchy, and intent. The page became an early exhibition space, with each edit, sequence, title, image, and interval contributing to the experience of the whole.
ARTISTS, AUDIENCES, AND
PUBLIC NARRATIVES
At Warner Music Philippines, Ric served as International Label Marketing Manager, handling the local development and promotion of an international roster that included Madonna, P. Diddy, Michael Bublé, Regina Spektor, and Josh Groban.
He adapted global campaigns for Philippine audiences, shaped narratives around new artists and album releases, cultivated relationships with editors, producers, and broadcasters, and secured media stories that gave each release a wider cultural frame.
He also spearheaded brand collaborations and strategic partnerships for album launches and promotions.
Working with artists across pop, R&B, hip hop, adult contemporary, and alternative music deepened his understanding of creative identity, public reception, and the care required to bring distinctive work to broad and specialized audiences.
DESIGN, STRATEGY, AND CULTURAL FORM
In 2011, Ric founded Design For Tomorrow, the Philippines’ top independent boutique branding, strategy, and design agency, and now one of the leading agencies of its kind working across Singapore and the broader Asia-Pacific region.
Through DFT, he has led projects across brand strategy, identity, publishing, placemaking, environments, and experience design for corporations, institutions, cultural organizations, entrepreneurs, and visionary leaders across Asia and beyond.
The work strengthened many of the instincts that now shape his exhibitions, including close reading, visual judgment, narrative construction, cultural positioning, editorial discipline, and the orchestration of an idea across language, image, material, and space.
It also gave him years of experience working closely with founders and creative leaders, helping them articulate the inner logic of a vision and carry it into public form.
AN INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION ON THE GROUND
Over the past thirteen years, Ric has pursued an active, self-directed immersion in international art and design culture through travel.
He has spent sustained time in major museums, contemporary art institutions, commercial galleries, artist-run spaces, art and design fairs, international expositions, and cultural events across Asia, Europe, and Australia.
The route has carried him from Bangkok, Berlin, and Barcelona to Tokyo, Taipei, and Paris; from Manila, Melbourne, and Munich by way of Madrid; and through Amsterdam, Kyoto, Osaka, Hong Kong, Singapore, Copenhagen, Lisbon, London, Vienna, Prague, Hanoi, Chiang Mai, Ho Chi Minh City, Sydney, and Yangon.
These visits became a continuing education inside the places where art is exhibited, discussed, collected, supported, and encountered. Across museums, galleries, fairs, expos, and independent spaces, he studied how exhibitions are constructed, how institutions build cultural context, how commercial galleries sustain artists, and how audiences move through spaces shaped by architecture, geography, and local history.
This exposure brought him into contact with exhibition models at very different scales, from major public institutions and international expositions to intimate galleries, independent art spaces, and culturally specific events rooted in their cities.
SPRUCE
In 2023, these accumulated experiences found a home in SPRUCE, the independent magazine and art gallery Ric co-founded in Metro Manila.
As Founding Curator, he develops each exhibition through close engagement with the artist, the process behind the work, and the ideas connecting one piece to another.
His approach draws from museum interpretation, editorial sequencing, visual culture, cultural writing, brand narrative, and spatial design. It is informed by a career spent recognizing talent, shaping stories, and creating meaningful points of encounter between creative work and its audience.
His curatorial projects include Behind the Door by Lin Jaihang, Portals of Curiosity by PJ Almera, Moments in Life — Live Moments by Stephan Holzinger, Squares of Water by Jeff Siscar, and Fragmentia: Oculations of Reality by Kevin Pineda.
He also wrote the exhibition note and curatorial statement for Alembong, presented through the FASHIONPhilippines Milan Mentorship Program at Fondazione Sozzani in Italy, and worked on staging and curating the Manila launch of BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! book, an international art photography exhibition presented in collaboration with The Little Black Gallery in London and Kehrer Verlag in Germany.
A CONTINUING COMMITMENT
TO NEW TALENT
Ric is especially drawn to artists at defining points in their development: those presenting a first major body of work, entering a new medium, reaching a wider geography, or arriving at a clearer articulation of their practice.
His commitment to emerging talent reaches back to VISIONS at Museo Iloilo, the Student DJs of Q89, and the young writers, photographers, designers, musicians, and artists given early space across the cultural platforms he helped build.
At SPRUCE, this commitment is carried through research, conversation, exhibition-making, writing, publishing, and the physical experience of the gallery.
Each project begins with sustained attention to the work, following its particular language and finding the form through which it can be encountered with depth and immediacy.
Ric’s curatorial practice continues to grow from a lifelong engagement with culture as something lived, interpreted, shared, and kept in motion.
