The Filipinx edition of The People's Pantry comes from my own experience growing up in a multi-racial home in Northern California.
My mother immigrated to the United States when she married my father, bringing a lifetime's worth of family recipes that I have slowly been trying to learn myself. Represented in this piece are the products that were staples in our own pantry: Spam, which was the one food that my Minnesota-bred father and Filipino-born mother could agree on wholeheartedly; White Rabbit candy, which was a delightful treat at the end of our family's monthly shopping trips to Seafood City in Vallejo; and the one-two punch of Silver Swan soy sauce and Datu Puti vinegar that my mom swears by for chicken adobo.
$20 from every print sold will be donated to the Coalition of Asian American Leaders (CAAL), a Minnesota-based non-profit that serves as a social justice network of leaders with a mission to harness their collective power to improve the lives of community by connecting, learning, and acting together.
11" x 14" Risograph art print, printed on 65# cream stock. Each art print will come as a signed edition. Printed in the USA.
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The People's Pantry is a project that explores immigration through food. You could say that food is one of the foundations of culture – everyone's gotta eat, and often the most approachable way to share culture is through cuisine. But food is something that so many of us take for granted. The availability of "American staples" like ketchup, Wonderbread, potato chips, and the like are almost a given at any American supermarket. For many immigrants, refugees, and their families, however, finding the products we grew up with is a taller order. We do not see these products lining the shelves of our local Safeway or Cub, but instead in the family-owned specialty markets tucked away in cities across the country. Depending on where you live, these sauces or snacks or seasonings can sometimes feel like rarities – elusive products that you have to make a special trip for, but the comforts they bring are immeasurable.
The People's Pantry began as a way to illustrate the foods that I grew up with in my Filipino-American household. But everyone who is part of a diaspora has their own version of this illustration. With this series, I hope to capture some of those stories by partnering with individuals who have their own unique relationships with the foods of their cultural heritage.
"Risograph is a print process which combines the best of digital and traditional print: a hand-made look and feel with the speed and efficiency of a modern printer. Risograph ink is made from a combination of environmentally friendly soy oil, water and pigment, the prints are reminiscent of newspaper ink and it is possible to smudge the ink. Riso is like screen printing in that each ink color is layered on separately. A single piece of paper will run through our machines several times for multi-color projects and the overlap of colors can be irregular." – Risolve Studio