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Sumi ink on cardboard boxes saved by the artists and the institution, size of a wall. Painted onsite in collaboration with their daughter Agnes, and sometimes in collaboration with the public. 2015-2026

The Venice iteration was made at the European Cultural Center in Palazzo Mora, 2026

The Boston iteration was made at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt), 2026

The Boston iteration at MassArt, was called Painting Together Quietly and was made at the Arnheim Gallery in collaboration with students and professors from Tufts University and Massachusetts College of Art and Design. See below for full credits.

The San Antonio iteration was made in residence at Artpace.

The New Haven iteration at Artspace was called The Stacks.

The Lima iteration Mercado Libre was made with contributions by museum guards at the Centro Cultural de Espana en Lima, Peru.

The earliest iteration of the carboard wall was at the Luminary in St Louis 2016, made with Texas crude oil rather than ink.

Free Shipping. (Translated Mercado Libre in Lima since the concept free shipping does not exist in Peru.)

Sumi ink on cardboard boxes saved by the artists and the institution, size of a wall. Painted onsite in collaboration with their daughter Agnes, and sometimes in collaboration with the public. The material is a symbol of the world market: the Cardboard Box Index is used by investors to gauge consumer consumption futures.

Luminary St Louis, Missouri. Curated by James McAnally. 2016
Artspace New Haven, Connecticut. Curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin. 2022
Artpace San Antonio, Texas. Curated by Missla Libsekal. 2023
Centro Cultral de España Lima. Lima, Peru. Curated by Maricel Delgado. 2024
Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston MA, organized by Tufts University Art Gallery curator Laurel V. McLaughlin, and MassArt professor Erik DeLuca. 2026
Professor Qais Assalis' class Art for Social Change from Tufts University. Keira Lavelle, Mallory Kang, Helen Berger, Yolanda Jiang, Kiran McCormick, Alexa Carrillo, and Shawn Stolarz. Professor Dara Bayer's MassArt art education class: Sheila Francisco, Emily Miner, AJ Taylor, Angela Zhang, Justine Torres, Kristen Hearrold, Melissa Goodman, Duru Ozkefeli, and Lauren Anderson
Professor Erik DeLuca's MassArt art education class.
European Cultural Center, Venice, Italy, Palazzo Mora. 2026

Cardboard Boxes, Over and Over Again

Text by Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD. Deputy Director Tufts University Art Gallery, Boston.

Stretched out across the floor of a former furniture showroom-turned-small non-profit in the post-industrial Connecticut city of New Haven, artistic duo Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas (Bergman & Salinas) made sumi ink marks across cardboard boxes, occasionally stopping to invite their daughter Agnes Bergman-Salinas into the mark-making process. 1 Together they paint quietly as passersby roamed past the showroom windows, pausing at times to observe.

The installation Stacks (2022–ongoing), as I watched it being marked into being as a curator of Bergman & Salinas’s exhibition in New England, hinges upon collected recycled boxes at each location in which it is installed. Bergman & Salinas’ gesture of overlapping cardboard existed earlier in an exhibition OPW? POW!, June 3rd–July 21, 2016, at The Luminary in St. Louis, and curated by James McAnally. In its first public presentation, clean cardboard was arranged as a seeming grid, the hallmark of modernity’s obsession with new rationalized order. 2 Subtle splatters of Texas crude oil interrupts the purported sanitation of the grid. But the cardboard itself, a utilitarian material invented in 19th century and popularized globally in the U.S. industrial Revolution and turn to the 20th century, already signals a departure with modernism’s infatuation with the present in its use and reuse of previous everyday material, or detritus.

For the installation in New Haven, the reused substrate absorbs deeper swaths of soot-and-water ink drawn and painted in splattered marks and carefully articulated abstract forms that resemble darkening skies or beleaguered waters. The artists employ the ink as an ancient technology from “common human knowledge, independently discovered by many early cultures, a shared scientific heritage.” 3 Adjacent to the marks are the indexes of journeys across the globe and goods—stickers denoting Amazon Prime memberships, obscured addresses, and shipping rates in a variety of languages and countries on the surfaces of the cardboard. 4 Tucked into the corners of the cardboard are United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) photographs, referencing an accompanying installation work Contra el bien general (2022), in which Bergman & Salinas reprint a chapter of Karl Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867) en masse. Each green-print, perfect-bound book launches a critique of capitalism with Marx’s elucidation of how the free market system strips the common good from the people through the ruling class’s focus on money, labor, and power over the conditions and humanity of the working classes. 5 USDA photographs punctuate portions of the chapter with cardinals, farms, and fields, circulating the knowledge of a fragile resource ecosystem as a means of refusal to the infinite click of boxed packages divorced from their material origins. Stacks and Contra el bien general instead embody that human relation through mark-making, or the sharing of knowledge, is prioritized over and against capital.

In 2023 exhibition Freedom in San Antonio, Texas, the duo and their daughter reconceived the installation Stacks as Free Shipping (2023) without the USDA photographs, as the works lined the wall, resembling a roof turned sideways, or multiple leaflets pinned to a community board, or the side of a shelter. 6 Exhibited alongside organically wood-shaped mesquite paintings with sumi ink. Known in the region as both a pest plant to Texan farmers and producer of nitrogen in the soil to native communities such as the Coahuiltecan people, the wood serves as an ecological index of its environment, much like the installations in their various sites.

And most recently in an exhibition Mercado Libre at the Centro Cultural de España Lima in Peru, the center, its neighbors, and local businesses saved cardboard for use in a centrally sited mural. 7 The mural covers the pink municipal building, extending beyond the exhibitionary space into the public center. The duo opened the collective process of construction in a radical extension of the painting process with publics. The images stretched from abstractions to figural contributions of landscape from the region. In New England at Massachusetts College of Art’s Arnheim Gallery, the duo compounds this extension with audiences in the northeast, publishing a manual of their abstracted lexicon, and inviting them to paint together in times of crisis. 8

Whether in a northeast post-industrial city, the arid southwest, the valleys of the Chillón, Rímac, and Lurín rivers, or in colonial New England, the responsive installation as Bergman-Salinas conceive of it, offers relational points of connection and indexical revelations. In familial or collective community, the duo and their family engage with audiences over sumi ink marks in order to “paint quietly,” meditating upon histories of ecological destruction and regeneration, capital and its extractions upon human labor, and making as a process towards communal understanding. The marks themselves embody traces of cross-temporal connection from ancient ink technologies, to current recycling methods in the U.S. Each black stroke, can be a memory, a commitment, a bellwether.

1 The work was included in a second iteration in a solo exhibition, Against the Common Good/ Contra el Bien General, Artspace New Haven, CT, September 17—December 3, 2022, organized by the author in dialogue with the artists.
2 See Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1985.
3 Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman, “How to Delay Extinction,” New Haven: INCA Press and Artspace New Haven, 2022, https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/61863/.
4 The artists indicate that the work was inspired by the Cardboard Box Index, an economic indicator of demand. See “Understanding the Cardboard Box Index: A Key Economic Indicator,” Investopedia, December
5 2025, Accessed 8 February 2026, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cardboardboxindex.asp5 The stacked books pay homage to the artist Félix González-Torres who used stacks as a way to accumulate intimate material and then subsequently give it away as a radical act of sharing.
6 In the exhibition Freedom, November 9, 2023–January 28, 2024, Artpace San Antonio, TX, curated by Missla Libsekal.
7 In the iteration installed in Peru, the translation for Free Shipping is Mercado Libre, or literally “market freedom,” Mercardo Libre, 24 September-24 December, 2024, Centro Cultural de España Lima, Lima, Peru, curated by Maricel Delgado.
8 See Aeron Bergman & Alejandra Salinas, Crisis Manual of Painting, INCA Press, 2026.Printed in collaboration with Liv/Ollie O’Quinn. Bergman & Salinas realized the installation at Massachusetts College of Art as part of an Art Education Residency entitled Painting Together Quietly organized by Associate Professor Erik DeLuca, March 11–18, 2026.

“Cardboard Boxes Over and Again: Stacks, Free Shipping, and Mercardo Libre” accompanies the Art Education Residency with Bergman & Salinas, Painting Together Quietly, March 11–18, 2026 at MassArt, Arnheim Gallery, organized by Associate Professor, Erik DeLuca. The Bergman & Salinas residency is supported by the Art Education Department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and the Office of Justice, Equity, and Transformation. The publication is authored by Tufts University Art Galleries Curator and Director of the Collective Futures Fund, Laurel V. McLaughlin, pdf designed by McCall Hollister.

Ink

Text by Bergman Salinas

Ink is our commons, and a renewable resource. Black ink is made from soot, that is, carbon, by burning organic material such as oil, sap, bones, and tar. Making ink from soot is common human knowledge,
independently discovered by many early cultures, a shared scientific heritage.

In ancient Egypt ink was obtained by burning wood or oil and mixing the resulting concoction with water and gum arabic. Around 3200 B.C. scribes used black, carbon-based ink for the body of text. The ancient Maya made carbon black ink made of soot scraped off the bottoms of cooking pans, producing high quality carbon. The Aztecs called soot-based ink tlilpopotzalli, a name derived from the Nahuatl noun tlilli, which refers to soot or black ink, and the verb popotza, which means “to produce smoke.”

As artists, we are drawn to rich, black inks, attracted to their density, smoothness, and flow of application. A surface covered with lampblack ink will absorb about 97% of incident light.

Locked inside with all the doors and windows taped shut during the annual West Coast forest fires, it struck us that the same material we were using to make drawings also produced the thick, relentless blanket of smoke outside.

The size and power of the fires cannot be depicted by language, and despite a proliferation of newspaper coverage, those of us who are able, simply moved on to the next crisis: is it economic collapse next? War? Forest fires are burning on earth almost year around, shifting with the seasons from the northern hemisphere to the southern. The last time there was this much wood turning to carbon, it deposited the coal marking the end-Permian extinction event. Those of us living near these massive fires were advised to use masking tape to seal up all the vents, ducts, cracks, and gaps in our homes, to minimize the air entering our living spaces. Some mention was given to the unstudied hazards of breathing this dark air, especially toxic to those who work or sleep outside, but no solutions were offered. We were and are on our own.

(Excerpt from essay How to Delay Extinction by Bergman Salinas)

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Sumi ink on cardboard boxes saved by the artists and the institution, size of a wall. Painted onsite in collaboration with their daughter Agnes, and sometimes in collaboration with the public. 2015-2026

Cardboard Boxes, Over and Over Again

Ink

Free Shipping:
Venice - Boston - Lima - San Antonio - New Haven - St Louis