Soma Project
In SOMA Project (2022), Cherisse Alcantara traces the layered geographies of San Francisco’s SOMA Pilipinas Cultural Heritage District, painting scenes from sites of personal and collective resonance—Victoria Manalo Draves Park, Bessie Carmichael Elementary School, Alice Street Community Gardens, and Kapwa Gardens. These are spaces shaped by the histories, struggles, and everyday lives of the city’s Filipinx community.
Initially drawn to the natural elements found in these places—a banana tree, a calamansi planter, a patch of community-tended earth—Alcantara explores the ways land can anchor memory, restore relationship, and ground identity across distance. Her paintings are not just records of place, but meditations on dwelling, transience, and the spiritual dimensions of diaspora. As an adoptee, Alcantara’s search for roots—both literal and ancestral—adds another layer to this inquiry, shaping her understanding of home and embodied memory.
Through this body of work, Alcantara asks what it means to find connection in a place marked by erasure and endurance. The act of painting becomes a way to inhabit these questions—to feel one’s way into them—and to offer something back to the land that continues to hold and shape the Filipinx American community of the Bay Area.
This work was made possible through a 2022 Balay Kreative Growth Grant.