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Palo Alto, California and Palo, Leyte (The Philippines) have been Sister Cities for over thirty years and decided to celebrate their friendship with an exhibition in California about Phillippine cultural heritage.

To curate this exhibition, I had the good fortune to spend five weeks in the Philippines meeting fishermen, rice farmers, teachers, builders, coconut farmers, lawyers, engineers and architects and artisans in almost every medium imaginable. Filling a 40-foot sea container with bamboo as strong as steel, a canoe, a mail box, a full set of living room furniture, even a pedi-cab, the ingredients for this exhibition arrived in San Francisco after five weeks at sea. Set against paintings of rice paddies, mountains, an island shoreline and Palo's town center, we built a marketplace, two kinds of bamboo houses and a family-owned variety store, called a Sari Sari