Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2025)
SOMA Project for Makibaka - A Living Legacy, 2025
Digitally collaged stair riser installation (scanned oil paintings on vinyl decal)
Alcantara transforms YBCA's staircase into a visual map of San Francisco's SOMA, drawing from her oil paintings of local community spaces. Scanned and collaged into a continuous image, the work echoes movement through the built environment. Layered with natural forms-foliage, blooms, brushstrokes— it reflects on how land, care, and memory shape home. The mural invites viewers to reflect on SOMA not as a fixed place, but a lived, evolving relationship grounded in time, movement, and collective belonging.
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.