bayot (noun, Cebuano)

In the Philippines, a bayot is an individual with effeminate qualities, or a person who has embraced a feminine gender expression. For self-taught Filipino-American artist Tommy Bayot, whose sexual identity is ingrained deeply in his work, his last name couldn't be more felicitous.

The St. Pete-based artist is known for his playful approach to illustrating his personal experiences as a gay person. "I like art that is beautiful and intriguing," he says. "I see art as an opportunity for social and political commentary, which, in some ways, becomes a historical log. My themes are about love, the LGBTQIA+ community, inclusivity, social injustice, nostalgia."

Mr. Bayot's brand of pop art is a quirky amalgamation of nostalgic childhood references and tongue-in-cheek visual narratives. "My identity has influenced my work through the different themes I choose," Tommy explains. "The various social and political issues that I hope my viewers will think upon, and the way I reference certain childhood/past memories when deciding how to visually show my messages." 

Nothing better displays Tommy's kittenish style than his "Hubo" series, in which he reimagines the sign language chart by replacing hand signs with painted genitals. He further explores this theme through the more textural Tuldok and Tinik series, where he uses hardened lumps of paint to interpret the different shapes of breasts and labia.

Tommy also has a penchant for meticulously recreating school writing pads on large canvases, using them as larger-than-life platforms to evoke childhood nostalgia.

His Writing Lines series begins wholesomely with paintings of the alphabet written neatly in cursive across blue and red-lined paper. But in true Bayot fashion, he subverts this scholastic rigor in his next painting, I will not not say gay, no. 1, where he repeatedly writes the phrase "I will not not say gay" in cursive on every line, transforming a task associated with punishment into a bold declaration of selfhood.

In his Exordium paintings, Tommy replaces the clean rows of words and letters on giant writing pads with doodles of robots--complete with red laser beams coming out of their eyes and rockets launching off their hips. To add to the sentimental realism of his youth, he even includes random scribbles of phone numbers and the jaggedly written letters AMDG--an acronym deeply familiar to Jesuit-educated Catholics like himself.

Most of Bayot's 40-odd paintings now reside in his studio at The Factory, an art-centric establishment in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida. Asked about his future plans, he says, "My plan is to continue to get to know the Tampa Bay art community, start entering other cities, and show in galleries around the world."

With a large body of work that's as intriguing as it is effortlessly appealing, we don't see that merely as an ambition, but as an inevitable outcome.