The Many Islands of "America"

Aruna D'Souza, Hyperallergic, September 16, 2026

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.