Entre Ser y No Ser: A Collective Archive of Memory and Resilience
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The Browsing Room Gallery | September 13 – October 25, 2025
When Entre Ser y No Ser closed at The Browsing Room Gallery in the downtown Presbyterian Church this October, the room seemed to hum with echoes of what had transpired there—traces of voices, gestures, and silences that had taken shape through clay, paint, sculpture, and portraiture. The exhibition had been imagined as a threshold, a space between worlds where memory and imagination could meet. In the weeks that followed, I found myself returning to the quiet conversations that unfolded within those walls and beyond them, across communities, media, and the wider city.
From the first day, the gallery felt alive with an unspoken rhythm—slow, deliberate, almost devotional. Visitors moved softly, taking time to absorb the weight of texture, the warmth of clay, the subtle fracture of pigment. The works invited listening. Each piece carried its own heartbeat, but together they formed a collective pulse, a living archive of displacement, resilience, and belonging.
One of the pieces that struck me, Ruben Torres’ Maternity, explored the fragility of identity through abstracted figures in embrace—a mother and a child, reminding viewers of nurturing and displacement. Faces and forms dissolved into washes of color, then reassembled themselves through the gestures of the brush—both revealing and concealing, both present and in flux. In these layered compositions, memory behaved like light through water: refracted, shifting, alive. Visitors often stood before them for long stretches of time, tracing each fragment as if piecing together their own reflection.
Across the room, abstracted landscapes folded inward, becoming less about geography and more about emotional and psychological terrain. Brushstrokes curved and collided, suggesting migration routes, riverbeds, or even pulse lines. These paintings seemed to hold the tension between vastness and intimacy, mirroring the experience of carrying many worlds within a single body. They invited wandering, not for destination but for recognition—a return to something half-remembered and still unfinished.
Sculptural works translated these themes into physical form. Hand-sculpted clay and folded mirrored aluminum captured emotion in motion—compressed, expanding, uncontained. Their surfaces bore the memory of hands, a record of touch and transformation. Viewers often approached them instinctively, reminiscing on their own ancestral migration stories. Each form spoke of endurance, of how bodies remember even when words fail.
A large-scale clay vessel created by Cesar Pita grounded the exhibition in tactile memory. The vessel’s imperfect symmetry and warm patina carried the labor of ancestral craft. It was not simply an object to behold but it held presence—a container of survival, of the invisible work that sustains families, histories, and communities across distance. Standing among it, one could sense time collapsing: the gesture of the maker mirrored by the gesture of the ancestor.
Large abstracted paintings, layered with gestures and symbols, unfolded like public declarations. These works operated as collective maps, charting both personal and communal memory. Figures emerged and dissolved into color fields, gestures intertwined with abstract marks that hinted at language. The walls became archives—spaces of visibility for stories too often made invisible. People lingered in front of these pieces, pointing to abstraction, tracing paths with their eyes, telling their own stories aloud. Among them, Aún Así, by Alfredo Gonzalez (Dofre), drew particular attention to the haunting immigrant experience in modern times.
The gallery itself, modest in scale, was transformed into a cohesive, interconnected display that encouraged movement and contemplation. As noted in The Nashville Scene, the exhibition’s design made the show feel seamless, each work conversing with the next across medium and theme. What began as a last-minute programming effort at the Browsing Room, part of my artist-in-residence work at the Downtown Presbyterian Church, became a space of profound engagement, where audiences could encounter migration, memory, and resilience as lived, embodied experiences.
Over the course of the exhibition, audience interactions became part of the work itself. Visitors didn’t simply observe—they participated, shared, and reflected. When Telemundo invited a conversation about the show’s intent, I spoke about the act of listening: how the exhibition wasn’t designed to declare answers but to create space for empathy. The coverage helped the work reach beyond the gallery’s physical space, connecting to communities for whom these stories resonate most deeply.
The Nashville Scene recognized Entre Ser y No Ser as a Critics Pick, highlighting the exhibition’s ability to merge aesthetic rigor with social consciousness. Their review described it as “a layered conversation between artists and ancestors,” which felt profoundly true to what we intended. For a show rooted in the experience of those who live between worlds, that recognition meant that the conversation had, in some sense, reached home.
Looking back, the most powerful moments weren’t necessarily the public ones. They happened in the quiet exchanges: a visitor whispering to another about her mother’s migration story, a group of students pondering in silence, a musician hearing the silent notes of ancestral hymns. The exhibition became a meeting place—between people, memories, and emotions that rarely share the same room.
The dialogue between mediums was at the heart of that experience. Paintings and landscapes created space for figures and sculptures to breathe; vessels grounded what might otherwise have floated away. Each work reflected another, and in their togetherness, something larger emerged—a collective voice that transcended language. The show was never meant to present answers, but to embody a question: What does it mean to exist in the in-between, to carry both loss and hope, to persist and to imagine?
In Nashville, a city celebrated for its sound, it felt necessary to build a space that listened instead. Too often, the narratives of immigrant and diasporic communities remain peripheral to the cultural conversation. This exhibition sought to center them, not as symbols or themes, but as living presences shaping the very fabric of the city. The response—through media, audience engagement, and community dialogue—affirmed the importance of making that space visible and sustainable.
As the final pieces were taken down and the gallery returned to stillness, the residue of those stories lingered in the air. The show had ended, but its afterimage remained—in photographs, in reviews, in the words people carried away with them. Entre Ser y No Ser became what it set out to be: a collective act of remembrance, a conversation across time and geography, a record of resilience as a continuous act of becoming.
To curate this exhibition was to witness the power of art to bridge distances—between people, languages, and histories. It reminded me that resilience is not a static triumph but a living practice, renewed each time a hand shapes clay, a brush meets canvas, or a viewer pauses in recognition. The show’s success, measured not only in coverage or attendance but in connection, lies in the way it asked us all to dwell, however briefly, in the space between being and not being—and to find, within that space, the pulse of our shared humanity.
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Andrés Bustamante is a Sculptor and Public Artist born in Cali, Colombia, working in South Florida. Bustamante studied at Watkins College of Art in Nashville, TN followed by an experimental practice in sculpture. Selected solo exhibitions include “Reflexion” at Watkins College of Art in Nashville, TN in 2022. He has been awarded the Artist-To-Artist award at ArtPrize 2024 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. As well as having works in the permanent collection of MOCAN (Museum of Contemporary Art Nashville).His immigrant experience at a young age led him to existential questions about reality, and the abstract mystery of life. Embracing the abstraction in the human experience and ephemeral emotion. An attempt to say in shape, color, and material that for which the spoken language has no words for. Bustamante lives by the conviction that creativity is healing for humanity. He is passionate about community empowerment, mental health, and accessibility in the visual arts. To learn more about his mission and collect art visit andresbustm.com@andresbustm
