Sowing Seeds: Filipino American Stories from the Pajaro Valley

FAIN: GE-290749-23

Regents of the University of California, Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA 95064-1077)
Kathleen Gutierrez (Project Director: August 2022 to present)

Planning for a traveling exhibition that documents the history of the Filipino American community in California.

Sowing Seeds is a traveling art and history exhibition that highlights the history and memory of the first generation of Filipino farmworkers to arrive in the United States in the early twentieth century. Debuting in 2024 at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, the exhibit brings together original oral history interviews, archival research, and contemporary works of art to feature multidimensional narratives of belonging, community formation, and memory preservation. The culmination of a four-year collaborative partnership among Filipino community members, scholars, and curators, the exhibit confronts the unevenly documented history of Asian American immigration and labor. After the debut, the exhibit will travel to museums along the farmworkers’ transnational labor migration path. Sowing Seeds will challenge assumptions of the Asian American experience, encourage the preservation of community memories, and inspire inquiry at the intersection of historical research and the arts.