> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://hyperallergic.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Banal Presents, the Final Chapter of the Three-Part Exhibition Colored People Time Is on View at ICA Philadelphia
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/banal-presents-the-final-chapter-of-the-three-part-exhibition-colored-people-time-is-on-view-at-ica-philadelphia/
- Published: 2019-09-17T15:45:30.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T15:53:22.000Z
- Description: A profound exploration into how the history of chattel slavery and colonialism in America exists in and impacts our present moment. On view through December 22, 2019.
- Author: ICA Philadelphia
- Tags: Announcement, Exhibition Announcement, ICA Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:34 (2019, 2020, part 1)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2019/09/2019_fall_ica_lopez-6551.jpg)

Michelle Lopez, ??????? & ??????????, 2019⁣. Photo by Constance Mensh.

“For a writer does but conjugate the tenses and ten – sions of time through verbal means, and his scope is dismally reduced if \[they\]… must keep step with the indiscriminant rush towards the future, disregarding the only fullness in time: the presents, where we remember and where we imagine.”

— Carlos Fuentes, “Remember the Future” (1985)

[*Banal Presents*](http://bit.ly/2mhKSD5?ref=hyperallergic.com) is the third and final chapter in the exhibition series *Colored People Time*, which has unfolded over the course of the past year through the presentation of two preceding chapters, *Mundane Futures* and *Quotidian Pasts*. *Banal Presents* stages a conversation between the artists Carolyn Lazard, Cameron Rowland, and Sable Elyse Smith. Through varying approaches, these artists examine the ongoing repercussions of chattel slavery with a focus on property, reparations, and the medical industrial and prison-industrial complexes. Across these themes, all three artists utilize the everyday as the site for continuing interrogation of systemic oppression. In *Banal Presents* the present serves as the grounds for critical intervention.

Colored People Time is organized by ICA Assistant Curator Meg Onli and will be accompanied by a catalog published in early 2020\. A robust program and a collaboration with the quarterly literary magazine *Callaloo* will also support the exhibition.

*Colored People Time: Banal Presents* is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (118 S. 36th Street  
Philadelphia, PA 19104) through December 22, 2019.

**For more information, visit** [**icaphila.org/colored-people-time-banal-presents/**](http://bit.ly/2mhKSD5?ref=hyperallergic.com)**.**

Major support for *Colored People Time* has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.