Soma Project
SOMA Project, 2022
Oil paintings on canvas
In SOMA Project, Cherisse Alcantara traces the layered geographies of San Francisco's SOMA Pilipinas Cultural Heritage District, painting scenes from places of personal and collective resonance: Victoria Manalo Draves Park, Bessie Carmichael School/Filipino Education Center, Alice Street Community Gardens, and Kapwa Gardens. These are spaces shaped by the histories, struggles, and everyday lives of the city's Filipino community.
Drawn first to the small pockets of nature in this urban landscape—a banana tree, a calamansi planter, a patch of tended earth-Alcantara explores how land can anchor memory and identity across distance. Her paintings are meditations on transience, rootedness, and the spiritual dimensions of diaspora. As an adoptee, her search for both literal and ancestral roots deepens this inquiry into home and embodied memory.
This work was made possible through a 2022 Balay Kreative Growth Grant.