A show on art from Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and their diasporas touches on themes of colonization, enslavement, migration, and more.
WATERVILLE, Maine — At the entrance of the conceptually ambitious exhibition Imagining an Archipelago: Art from Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Their Diasporas at the Colby College Museum of Art are four works that embody many of its themes. A painting by Cuban-born Zilia Sánchez is composed of white marks that hover between fully abstract, figurative, and cosmological, traced on a gray-black ground, as if we are looking down at a body or up from a boat to the sky — either way, trying to find our bearings. Félix González-Torres’s “Untitled (USA Today)” (1990) lays out candies in wrappers of red, white, and blue for viewers to consume over time, incorporating the colors of the American flag (along with the patriotism it implies) into our very bodies. The letters of a 2023 concrete poem by the CHamoru scholar and poet Craig Santos Perez spell out “Archipelagoes resemble constellations,” spaced out like an archipelago or constellation — or both — on the wall. A series of photographs by Juana Valdés, “On the Malecón” (2000), documents a performance in Havana, done in the wake of a mass migration of Cubans to the United States to escape economic privation, in which she set afloat paper boats fashioned from the torn-out pages of a 19th-century novel exploring the country’s racial and social hierarchies.
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Image Credit: Installation view of Amber Robles-Gordon, “Guam Political and Puerto Rico Political II” (2021) (all photos Aruna D’Souza/Hyperallergic)