Yumi Janairo Roth and Emmanuel David
Jessa, 2025
Archival ink on Hahnemuhle paper
Courtesy of the artists and David B. Smith Gallery

This work is on loan for the exhibition, Living Here, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, June 20 - December 20, 2025

In 2022, Emmanuel David and Yumi Janairo Roth came together to research a group of Filipino performers who toured the United States around the turn of the 19th century. The Filipinos joined the Rough Riders of the World performance in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West traveling show soon after the United States annexed the Philippines at the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898.

David and Roth tracked the group through traces left in the archives: a name in a logbook, a face at the edge of a photograph. In their project, the ephemera that only faintly marked the Filipinos’ presence when they were alive is reimagined with them as the stars. Noting that the advertising blitz for the Wild West show always focused on one name—Buffalo Bill—the artists have worked collaboratively, foregrounding the relationships that form within a collective.

The work in this exhibition comes from the latest stage of the project. Here, the artists traveled to the Philippines to weave the American history of the Filipino Rough Riders into the tapestry of contemporary Filipino life. On Masbate Island they made portraits of people who participated in the Rodeo Masbateño Festival, an annual celebration of Filipino cattle culture. In Manila, they collaborated with jeepney sign painters to produce 130 paintings that commemorated all of the cities and towns the Rough Riders traveled through in 1899, the first year of the Philippine-American War. The signs, and the video that accompanies them, are titled after the length of their journey: 11, 111 miles.