August 15 - November 29, 2025, Griffith Hall Gallery

Indications presents work by Artist-in-Residence Teresa Cervantes alongside her selections from the Marvin Samson Museum for the History of Pharmacy’s collection. The exhibition playfully draws on traditions of apothecary craft, pharmaceutical marketing, and visual art to reflect on the ways we construct ourselves using the products of the healthcare and wellness industries. Through Cervantes’ compounded artistic approaches, Indications divulges the hope, fear, and purpose contained within the domestic medicine cabinet. 

Included in the exhibition is a series of large-scale, hand-colored photographs that document the medicine cabinets of current Saint Joseph’s University students, faculty, and staff. Building on trust held between the MSMHP curator and members of the university community, Cervantes visited participants at their homes, where they opened their medicine cabinets to the artist. In each volunteer’s medicine cabinet Cervantes made one intervention: installing one of her sculptures. As a group the series presents a collective “image” of SJU’s varied approaches to private wellness routines and rituals of care.

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. 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. Special thanks also to the Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts.

About the Artist

Teresa Cervantes (b. 1987) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Winston Salem, NC with roots in El Paso, TX. As an artist, Cervantes fuses historical and material research, contemporary conditions and her hope for the future into performance, sculpture, installation and social practice. Through subtle sleights of hand and labor-intensive processes, consumer goods are transformed into poetic props and prompts for the everyday. She received her MFA in Sculpture from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture. 

As our 2024/2025 Artist-in-Residence, Cervantes spent over a year studying the museum’s collection of pharmacy material history. 

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. 

For Indications, Cervantes has curated artifacts from the museum’s collection that offer historical context for her original works by tracing technological advances in image-making, product design, and the development of the pharmaceutical industry in relation to advancements in art and craft traditions.