America, Unfinished?!, a national exhibit at WaterFire Arts Center in Providence, RI, features the work of 80 artists from 13 states and territories. I visited the 15,000-square-foot former rubber factory on a hot July day. The light-filled space is several stories high and could dwarf almost anything smaller than a jet, so it took me a while to find my bearings and focus on the work.
This survey show is primarily political, favoring passion over polished surfaces, and it largely succeeds despite itself — compelling, even moving, in its urgency. A few themes recur: the medical-industrial complex, disparities of wealth and privilege, and the political violence committed against marginalized groups. Alongside these critiques runs a counter-theme: how immigrant and other marginalized communities find agency, safety, and solace in each other, in family, and in cultural tradition.
A long, free-hanging white banner reminded me of a giant CVS receipt. On closer reading, it turned out to be a creatively typeset poem, The Hot Dog Is Holy, by queer Boston artist Marcel Marcel. What I first took for a top-heavy stone sculpture was in fact designed to look like a toppled granite monument — made from the mashed pages of old books: Can We Be Gentle? No. 1 (2025), by Lee Casstevens.
Hanako O’Leary’s ceramic series 1200 Spirits (Yomotsu-Shikome) (2018–ongoing) draws on traditional Japanese masks of female deities to convey a personal experience of feminine power. William Evertson’s searing woodblock prints, SCOTUS 6 (2023–2024), ask how a craving for money and power can corrupt the institution of justice. Heidi Jensen’s The Logjam (2025, Flashe vinyl on canvas) is the backdrop layer of a larger project — including puppetry and video — exploring the complicated legacy of the American lumberjack.
Jocelyn Vache’s ironic painting A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats (yeah, sure) (2025), pigment in soy on raw linen, uses an 8 x 8 foot monochromatic palette to depict sinking boats and drowning people, flanked by a luxury liner riding high on the water.
Mother Tongue (cattails, palm leaves, pandan leaves, yarn, twine; 25 x 10 feet, 2023), by Filipino American artist Bhen Alan, treats weaving as more than craft — a language of survival, adaptation, and belonging. The piece extends his ongoing exploration of the banig, an indigenous Philippine mat-weaving tradition.
America, Unfinished?! extends beyond the gallery walls, with video and performance pieces and a full slate of related events. One visit won’t be enough to take it all in. WaterFire deserves credit for taking on this kind of urgent, unresolved reckoning with the country — the sort a museum, weighed down by its own institutional caution, might never risk. Fittingly, for a show called America, Unfinished?!, neither the country nor the exhibit lets you leave with easy conclusions.
America, Unfinished?!, WaterFire Arts Center
475 Valley Street, Providence, RI 02908
Open 10:00 am – 5:00 pm, Wednesday through Sunday; until 9:00 pm on Thursdays.
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About the writer: Adria Arch is a Boston-based sculptor and painter who has been awarded residencies at Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Sanskriti Foundation in Delhi. Her work is included as a permanent installation at Google headquarters in Boston, and she is in the collections of the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Fidelity Corporation, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, among others. Arch has shown at Boston Sculptors Gallery, Brattleboro Art Museum in Vermont, and the Danforth Museum in Framingham, MA. Her work was recently featured at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art in California and the Boston City Hall Atrium Gallery. Her newest work is on view in Adria Arch: Anti-Gravity at the Distillery Gallery, South Boston. @adriaarch