The Many Islands of “America”
The Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, is presenting Imagining an Archipelago: Art from Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Their Diasporas, an exhibition featuring more than 40 contemporary artists and collectives. The show links these geographically dispersed places through shared histories of US colonial expansion after the War of 1898 (the Spanish-American War) and the Treaty of Paris, while addressing themes including colonization, enslavement, migration, and diaspora. Works at the entrance include Zilia Sánchez’s painting, Félix González-Torres’s Untitled (USA Today) (1990) candy spill in red, white, and blue wrappers, Craig Santos Perez’s 2023 concrete poem spelling “Archipelagoes resemble constellations,” and Juana Valdés’s On the Malecón (2000) photographs of a Havana performance involving paper boats made from pages of a 19th-century novel. Curated by Jessamine Batario, the exhibition is organized across two floors—one by region and one by theme—and frames its approach through “archipelagic thinking,” a concept associated with Édouard Glissant.
From This Briefing
This story was covered in Museum Power Plays, Union Strikes, and Sacred Heists