Indications: Teresa Cervantes
August 15 - November 29, 2025, Griffith Hall Gallery
Thurs 2-6, Fri 1-5, Sat 12-4 and by appointment
Indications presents work by Artist-in-Residence Teresa Cervantes alongside her selections from the museum’s collection of pharmacy material history. Drawing on traditions of apothecary craft, pharmaceutical marketing, and visual art, the exhibition divulges the 'hope', 'fear', and 'purpose' contained within the domestic medicine cabinet.
For Cervantes, the domestic medicine cabinet is a site of ritual self-construction: a porous space bridging the personal and political, the corporal and corporate. Throughout the museum’s gallery, visitors will find prop-like ceramic pill capsules, lotion pumps, and spray bottles painted with jaunty ad-copy such as, ‘CONTROL’ or ‘GANAS [desire]’; generic pharmacy packages blacked out into void-like forms; and assemblages of found objects featuring poetic detritus of the artist’s own daily body care routines. With these compounded artistic approaches, Cervantes intervenes in the ways we care for and construct ourselves using the products of the healthcare and wellness industries.
The presence of the artist’s hand in Cervantes’ work contrasts the ubiquitous, standardized forms populating the exhibition, begging the question: What is absent in the mass-produced? Indications invites viewers to consider the active ingredients of touch, time, play, and poetry as forms of resistance to today’s increasingly corporate health and wellness industries.
This exhibition was made possible with support from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.
View the Indications Gallery Guide here.
About the Artist
Teresa Cervantes (b. 1987) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Winston Salem, NC with roots in El Paso, TX. Cervantes’ work, spanning performance, sculpture, installation and social practice, fuses historical research, contemporary conditions, and her hopes for the future. Through subtle sleights of hand and labor-intensive processes, Cervantes transforms consumer goods into poetic props and prompts for the everyday. She received her MFA in Sculpture from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture.
Inside SJU's Medicine Cabinets
In the fall of 2024, Cervantes visited Saint Joseph University students, staff, and faculty at their homes, where they opened their medicine cabinets to the artist as portrait subject. In each volunteer’s medicine cabinet Cervantes made one intervention: installing a sculpture from her 'altered product packaging' series. The resulting images, larger-than-life hand-colored photo prints, document varied approaches to private wellness routines rendered in an off-kilter realism both personal and anonymous.
As the museum’s 2024/2025 Artist-in-Residence, Cervantes spent over a year studying the museum’s collection of pharmacy material history. For Indications, Cervantes has curated artifacts from the museum’s collection that offer historical context for her original works, tracing technological advances in image-making, product design, and the development of the pharmaceutical industry in relation to advancements in art and craft traditions.
Taking inspiration from the forms and decorative motifs of European ceramic apothecary jars–which themselves draw on those of Chinese, Southwest Asian, and North African predecessors–Cervantes created a series of hand-built ceramic vessels featuring playful, poetic juxtapositions of image, form, and text. This interplay of craft and healthcare traditions is infused with cultural references from Cervantes’ own experiences as a cis femme Chicana from the US/Mexico borderlands, complicating and expanding the visual history of pharmacy as told to date.
Featured Works
Get a sneak peek at works in the exhibition
