Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, 2024
Placesetting by Johanna Poethig
“These commissioned artworks will be displayed alongside other non-
commissioned artwork related to Filipino labor history in Watsonville. This includes Oakland-
based contemporary artist Johanna Poethig and her installation Placesetting which, “… combines
the utilitarian objects of a table setting with the art, necessity, emotion and politics of creating
home and community.” Reminiscent of the family heirlooms on display, Poethig inscribes
plates, teapots, and bowls with images of manongs who lived in the International Hotel, a low-
income single-room-occupancy residential hotel in San Francisco’s Manilatown that housed
many Filipino agricultural workers some of whom worked and lived in Watsonville.
The contemporary artists in the exhibition will provoke questions related to identity,
belonging, systemic racism, and place-making.”
Christina Ayson-Plank, Curator
Sowing Seeds: Filipino American Stories from the Pajaro Valley explores Filipino labor and migration to the Pajaro Valley from the 1930s to the present. The exhibition brings together oral history, archival materials, and contemporary works of art to feature multidimensional narratives across four themes: labor, gender, conflict, and memory. Sowing Seeds celebrates the perseverance of a Filipino American community to transform the Pajaro Valley into a home in the face of racism and exclusion.
The migration of Filipinos to the United States occurred at the dawn of U.S. colonization of the Philippines in the early twentieth century. The U.S. government appealed to Filipino farmers to travel to the U.S. and fill low-wage agricultural jobs. Roughly 100,000 Filipino men and women traveled across the Pacific to labor in fields. This generation of migrants is known as the manong and manang (“older brother” and “older sister”) generation. The Pajaro Valley was one major agricultural center where Filipinos worked and where some stayed.
Unfortunately, many of the manong and manang have long passed. Their stories live in the memories of their descendants. Sowing Seeds views these memories as key sites of historical and artistic research. By featuring family photographs, heirlooms, and recorded interviews, the exhibition highlights the stories that descendants seek to memorialize. Sowing Seeds also investigates how and what memories are remembered as a way to further explore diversity, difference, and multidimensionality. Eight California-based contemporary artists were invited to interpret these memories in order to visualize the social complexities of this Filipino American community.
The artists featured in Sowing Seeds include Minerva Amistoso, Binh Danh, Ant Lorenzo, Sandra Lucille, Johanna Poethig, Ruth Tabancay, Jenifer Wofford, and Connie Zheng.
