Inside a display case at 668 Ramona Street sits a skirt that hasn't been worn since the 1970s. Next to it hangs a photograph of the teenager who wore it, mid-step in a regional dance in Oaxaca, Mexico, partway through a summer exchange Palo Alto has been running since before most of downtown's current storefronts existed. She grew up to become president of the organization that sent her. Her name isn't the point. The point is that nobody driving down El Camino this week has any reason to know this story exists, unless they happen to walk into Pacific Art League before August 22.
The skirt is one piece in "Connected Worlds: Art and Artifacts from Palo Alto's Sister Cities," a show running through the end of this month at Pacific Art League, co-curated by Harriet Stern, who serves on the Palo Alto Public Art Commission and belongs to Neighbors Abroad, and Ed Fike, the organization's president. The exhibit pulls together objects tied to ten cities Palo Alto has formally partnered with over six decades, and most of what's on the walls has never been shown to the public before. It has been sitting in City Hall.
Two different versions of international
Ask most people what makes Palo Alto internationally connected and you'll get an answer about tech. Acquisitions, cross-border deals, a workforce drawn from everywhere. That version of the city's global identity is real and it's recent, mostly built in the last three or four decades alongside the industry itself.
There's an older version that has nothing to do with venture funding. It runs through a volunteer organization most residents have heard of only as a name on a City Hall directory, and it has been quietly accumulating gifts, exchange students, scholarships, and relief funds since 1963. The tech version of Palo Alto's global reach shows up in earnings calls. This version shows up in a storage room, and for three weeks this August, in a gallery on Ramona Street.
How ten cities ended up tied to one
Neighbors Abroad formed in the early 1960s as cities across the country signed on to a national town-affiliation push, and it has directed Palo Alto's official Sister Cities program ever since, operating as a volunteer body under the city's auspices rather than as a city department. The roster has grown well past its original handful. According to Neighbors Abroad's own listing, Palo Alto now carries formal ties to:
- Albi, France
- Bloomington, Indiana
- Enschede, Netherlands
- Heidelberg, Germany
- Linköping, Sweden
- Oaxaca, Mexico
- Palo, Leyte, Philippines
- Tsuchiura, Japan
- Yangpu District, Shanghai, China
Narok, Kenya, sits alongside these as a newer friendship-city relationship, rounding the network out to ten. A 2012 unveiling of a downtown kiosk honoring the program, funded jointly by the Rotary Club and Neighbors Abroad, listed only six cities at the time. Heidelberg, Bloomington, and Yangpu District have all joined since, which means the network you'd see documented on Ramona Street this month is younger and more active than most residents would guess.
"You won't just be seeing a pretty thing on the wall."
That's Stern, describing the intent behind the show. The exhibit isn't trying to be a conventional art survey, and it isn't trying to be a dry historical archive either. It sits between the two, using objects as evidence of relationships that mostly happened out of public view.
What's been sitting in storage
Some of what's on display belongs to Neighbors Abroad members who picked it up while traveling as representatives of the city. Other pieces arrived the opposite direction, brought by visiting mayors and foreign dignitaries as gifts to Palo Alto, then filed away in City Hall with little chance for anyone to see them again. One returning piece, a Swedish sculpture shaped like a heap of mashed potatoes and lingonberries, first appeared publicly in a 2023 Neighbors Abroad show called "We Are What We Eat" and has now come back for this run.
Fike put the reasoning behind pulling all of this together simply.
"There's no better way to do that than art."
The "that" he's referring to is building understanding across a relationship that, on paper, is just a line item in a city directory. In practice, it has meant things like the Albergue Infantil Josefino, an orphanage in Oaxaca that Neighbors Abroad has supported for decades, and a rotating cast of Palo Alto teenagers who've spent summers with host families three thousand miles from home and come back with stories nobody at their high school has context for.
Sixty years of specifics that don't make the news
None of this is purely historical. Neighbors Abroad marked the 15th anniversary of the Tsuchiura relationship in October 2024 and celebrated 30 years of ties with Albi the same year. The organization runs a student essay contest named for Leendert Overduin, a pastor from Palo Alto's Dutch sister city of Enschede who sheltered Jewish families during the Second World War, and it has raised more than $125,000 for a Ukraine relief fund supporting children affected by the war. In 2023, the organization opened a stipended artist residency in Linköping, Sweden, complete with airfare and an apartment, for a Palo Alto artist to spend the following spring painting and exhibiting there.
None of this shows up on a real estate listing or a corporate press release. It shows up in newsletters most residents never subscribe to, in a City Hall storage inventory, and, for three weeks this month, in a gallery just off University Avenue.
Seeing it before it's gone
The show closes August 22, which leaves about two weeks. Pacific Art League sits at 668 Ramona Street, in easy walking distance of downtown's usual Saturday routine. If you're already planning to be out that morning, the Downtown Palo Alto Farmers' Market runs on Gilman Street between Hamilton and Forest from 8 a.m. to noon, and a portion of its proceeds goes to Avenidas, the Midpeninsula's senior services organization. It's a small parallel to the exhibit's own point: a fair amount of what holds this city together runs quietly, funded and staffed by people who aren't asking for credit.
A short loop for a Saturday morning:
- Start at the farmers market on Gilman Street for coffee and produce.
- Walk the few blocks to Pacific Art League on Ramona Street before the gallery's Tuesday through Friday hours make this trickier later in the week, or check ahead for weekend exhibit access.
- Spend twenty minutes with the skirt, the Swedish sculpture, and the rest of what six decades of one volunteer organization decided was worth keeping.
The point of all this
Palo Alto's international reputation gets attributed to the same handful of causes over and over: the university, the industry, the workforce it draws. Those things are real, but they're recent by comparison. The relationships documented at Pacific Art League this month took shape one delegation, one exchange student, one shipped-over gift at a time, starting when Eisenhower's town-affiliation program was still a fresh idea and continuing quietly enough that most people who've lived here for years have never heard Neighbors Abroad's name. Something a resident learns from this show, and won't get from a headline about the next acquisition, is that Palo Alto has been building its global relationships longer than it's been building its tech identity, and almost none of it required a press release.
The exhibit closes soon. City Hall's storage room won't.
If you're weighing a move in Palo Alto or thinking through the timing of a sale, Christopher Mogensen brings the same close attention to the neighborhood's details, the kind that don't show up in a listing sheet, to the decisions that do end up on paper. Let's Connect.
