In Kariton ng Gulay, I explore how access to staple foods impacts immigrant communities through my mother’s experience. My mom, Shirley Janairo Roth, emigrated from the Philippines to the United States in the 1960s, eventually settling in Northern Virginia where she became a beloved cooking instructor and restaurateur. Due to the inaccessibility of Philippine produce, my mom frequently used substitutions for essential ingredients, which led me to ask, “what would it mean to give my mom access to vegetables that are central to her cooking?”

Commissioned by the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art for the exhibition agriCULTURE: Art Inspired by the Land, I was partnered with Mark DeRespinis, farmer/owner of Esoterra Culinary Garden. Mark pushes the boundaries of what is planted through his work with innovative chefs. Inspired by my mom’s story, Mark agreed to grow kangkong, a Philippine vegetable staple strictly regulated by the US because it can grow prolifically in waterways.

In parallel, I built a food cart inspired by those found throughout Manila in order for my mom to cook and serve DeRespinis’ kangkong to the public. The cart is carved and adorned in gold leaf with botanical illustrations of kangkong from the book Flora de Filipinas (1837) and in the style of James McNeill Whistler’s Peacock Room (1877), a to reference the nineteenth-century Western imagination of Asia. Through these layers, the cart became an emblem of how, as DeRespinis said, “people, plants, plates, and place” continuously intersect through diasporic migration, cross-cultural representation, and approximation.