On conventional maps of American history, islands often appear at the edges. Imagining an Archipelago: Art from Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Their Diasporas moves them deliberately to the centre.
Now on view at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, the exhibition brings together approximately 50 works by more than 40 artists. Its paintings, photographs, sculptures, videos, textiles and installations examine what the familiar story of American expansion leaves out: living cultures shaped by colonial rule, migration, militarisation, contested sovereignty and environmental change.
Yet curator Jessamine Batario did not set out to impose one account of those experiences. Artists helped form the exhibition through convenings held in 2022 and 2024. Conversations over shared meals led to a section on foodways and food sovereignty, while discussions of land, spirituality and military occupation created space for perspectives that can be contradictory as well as connected.
Batario is an art historian, curator and museum educator specialising in modern and contemporary art of the United States. Since 2021, she has served as the Linde Family Foundation Curator of Academic Engagement at the Colby Museum, where she works across teaching, faculty partnerships and exhibition development. In 2020, she co-founded Kababayan: Filipinx American Art History Working Group.
Her approach is especially relevant to a publication concerned with sustainability and ethics. The exhibition does not treat climate, empire, food or culture as separate subjects. Instead, it shows how environmental pressures enter domestic life, language, memory and art. It joins a broader conversation explored elsewhere in Unsustainable, including the ability of contemporary art to confront colonial violence and extractive ideas of progress.
The following interview was conducted by email.
Moving the Islands to the Centre
You have described the project as emerging partly from a history course about the United States as an empire, and from asking what followed Manifest Destiny and westward expansion. When islands are moved from the margins of that history to its centre, how does the familiar story of the United States change?
Imagining an Archipelago centers these islands within U.S. history, and accordingly, within U.S. art history. In September 2026, the Colby Museum co-hosted the Association of Historians of American Art Symposium, providing nearly 180 scholars in the field the opportunity to experience the exhibition. I am hopeful about the impact of the exhibition and its catalogue on future scholarship in the field of American art.
Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico share important historical connections, but they also have profoundly different cultures and present-day political relationships with the United States. How did you create connections between them without flattening those differences into a single story of colonisation?
The Colby Museum’s presentation is organized into both geographic and thematic sections. Upon entrance into the main galleries, visitors will experience art that introduces the islands and their unique cultures and histories. As visitors move in further into the exhibition, they will see artwork organized by theme in order to see connections.
The participating artists helped shape the exhibition through convenings rather than simply supplying works for a predetermined curatorial argument. Can you give an example of something the artists said, questioned, or disagreed about that materially changed the final exhibition?
During the first Islands Project Convening in 2022, the artists shared many meals together and discussed their cultural cuisines. These conversations opened to thinking about the histories of colonial foodways and present-day issues of food sovereignty. Food became one of the themes presented in the exhibition.
Resilience Beyond a Human Story
Climate crisis and resilience are among the exhibition’s themes. “Resilience,” however, can sometimes become a flattering word imposed on communities that have little choice but to endure environmental and political harm. How do the works complicate, or perhaps resist, that familiar representation of island resilience?
Resilience is a theme often used to tout the survival of communities affected by climate crisis. The exhibition reframes the concept of resilience to privilege the perspective of nature itself. How is the natural environment resilient in the face of human intervention? For example, Gamaliel Rodríguez’s Correctional Faith represents the Puerto Rican jungle overtaking an abandoned church in a former youth correctional facility. During the second Islands Project convening in 2024, the artists discussed this artwork at length, offering a provocation: who or what is doing the act of correction alluded to in the title, and to whom or what might we have faith?
During your research in Guam, you experienced both the routine presence of military aircraft and the sacred significance of places such as Fouha Rock. What did being physically present amid that coexistence of militarisation, livelihood, patriotism, ecology, and sacred land teach you?
In the last five years, my research on the contemporary art of Guam brought me to the island and to other cities across the United States. These travels gave me opportunities to meet with artists, environmental activists, scholars, cultural leaders and practitioners, and community members—many of whom stay in touch long after our first meetings. I have felt the palpable presence of the U.S. military on the island, and I have witnessed sacred rituals and moving cultural exchanges. These experiences reinforced the value of respect—for the land, sea, sky, and other people, and for myself. I carry these transformative experiences and stories, and they give me hope for the future.
Several works approach large histories through materials and ordinary life: food, clothing, family photographs, domestic spaces, religious practices, and inherited traditions. Is there one work that particularly demonstrates how an everyday object or practice can reveal the workings of empire?
Imelda Cajipe Endaya’s featured work in the exhibition is a found tablecloth containing handwritten scholarly text on how economic globalization policies contribute to an inherited and often unacknowledged colonial mentality, perpetuating the belief that anything foreign is superior to the homegrown. This modest textile brings the issue to the domestic interior of lived experiences, prompting viewers to think about how their daily habits are shaped by imperial legacies.
Museums Are Not Neutral
You have described the exhibition as a critique of US imperialism while also saying that it was not designed to advance one partisan position. How do you distinguish openness to multiple perspectives from political neutrality when the historical relationships themselves involve unequal power?
This exhibition is not neutral, as museums are not neutral. Imagining an Archipelago contains multiple perspectives. For example, the section on “Military Occupations” presents a nuanced entanglement of feelings, such as pride and resentment, sometimes in the same work. The artworks in this exhibition demonstrate that there is no single monolithic response to empire and instead offers the invitation to learn about the complexities of living with imperial legacies.
You have said that developing the exhibition changed your relationship with your own family history and that you sometimes consulted your mother about cultural questions. What did the project lead you to discover about your own inheritance?
I learned that one of my ancestors fought for independence against the Spanish and never came home. I learned that during World War II, my grandfather “smelled the end of a Japanese rifle” and survived. These stories give me a source of strength.
The publication includes material in English, Spanish, Filipino, and CHamoru. What does it mean to treat language as part of the exhibition’s politics rather than simply translating an English-language project for accessibility? Were there concepts that did not move neatly between languages?
Within the exhibition spaces, there are four title walls, one in each language spoken on the islands: English, Spanish, Filipino, and CHamoru. The exhibition catalogue contains a transcript of an artist conversation presented in all four languages alongside each other. Several artists live multilingual lives, and their artwork titles are often in other languages, sometimes translated into English, sometimes with no translation at all, and sometimes with a willful mistranslation. The U.S. banned the use of CHamoru for over a generation on Guam, and now that language is categorized as endangered. There is CHamoru in the exhibition to resist this erasure. It is especially moving to see CHamoru visitors as they experience their language reflected back to them in such a public place.
A Traveling Archipelago
The exhibition will eventually travel from Maine to Puerto Rico, San Francisco, and Newark. Do you expect its meaning to change when it reaches audiences with different relationships to the islands and their diasporas?
As Imagining an Archipelago travels to Puerto Rico, San Francisco, and Newark, its presentation will change to suit its local audiences. The Colby Museum placed this exhibition in these additional venues after conducting research on the locations of the most sizable populations of these islands’ communities and diasporas. At Colby College, this exhibition is at the heart of teaching and learning; at the other venues, this exhibition will hopefully find more personal resonance in addition to serving an educational purpose.
The exhibition remains at the Colby College Museum of Art until June 6, 2027. It will then travel to the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and the Newark Museum of Art. Full dates and visitor information are available from the official exhibition page.
For readers interested in the relationship between cultural institutions and environmental responsibility, see our wider examination of sustainability in the art world and our collection of interviews with sustainability changemakers.