María Magdalena Campos-Pons (born July 22, 1959) is a Cuban-born artist based in Nashville, Tennessee. Campos-Pons works primarily in photography, performance, audiovisual media, and sculpture. She is considered a "key figure" among Cuban artists who found their voice in a post-revolutionary Cuba. Her art deals with themes of Cuban culture, gender and sexuality, multicultural identity (Cuban, Chinese, and Nigerian) as well as interracial family (Cuban-American), and religion/spirituality (in particular, Roman Catholicism and Santería).Bell, Lynne. "History of People Who Were Not Heroes: A Conversation with Maria Magdalena Campos‐Pons." Third Text 12.43 (1998): 32-42. Print.
Early life and education Campos-Pons was born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1959 and grew up in a sugar plantation town called La Vega, Calimete in Cuba. Her paternal great-grandparents were Yoruba. She also has Chinese and Hispanic heritage. Her African ancestors, who were brought over by sugar plantation owners in the late 19th century, passed down traditions from Africa that influenced and became part of Campos-Pons's art. The African side of her family worked as slaves on sugar plantations and as domestic servants. The Chinese side of her family worked as indentured servants in sugar mills.
When she was young, Campos-Pons relates that during a trip to the National Cuban Museum of Fine Art, she distinctly felt that black Cubans were conspicuously missing from the art. She did not feel as though black Cubans were equally represented.
Campos-Pons has described much of her art education as very traditional, rooted in drawing and sculpture. She trained at the Escuela National de Arte in Havana between 1976 and 1979. From 1980 to 1989, she attended Havana's Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA). The ISA allowed students to be exposed to international artistic movements and develop art that drew from Cuba's unique "mixed traditions and cultures." Her ISA painting professor Antonio Vidal, a Cuban abstractionist, had a lasting impact on her work as a painter and she presented his work, along with her work with Neil Leonard at documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany.
Campos-Pons conducted her post graduate studies at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1988. While there, she created her first film that was scored by composer, saxophonist, Neil Leonard, whom she married in 1989. Before moving to Boston in 1991 to live with Leonard, she took a fellowship in Banff, Alberta. The artist also taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Since 2017, she has lived in Nashville, Tennessee.
Career Between 1986 and 1989 Campos-Pons was professor of Painting and Aesthetic at the Instituto Superior de Arte. She started exhibiting internationally in 1984. In the late 1980s, her art work gained "international recognition" with her abstract paintings dealing with female sexuality. Her work coincides with the rise of the New Cuban Art movement. The New Cuban Art movement began as a reaction against the repressive aspects of the Cuban state and the introduction of conceptual art.Cuban Art Wikipedia The movement was less focused on technical skill and more on creating an art that was genuinely Cuban. A large part of this artistic movement was the introduction of Afro-Cuban presence, both as artists and within the art itself. Humor and spirituality were major themes in New Cuban Art. Her early work, often consisting of separate, shaped canvases, suggested fragmentation of the female self and referenced Afro-Cuban myths. She also explored reproductive rights and feminism through her art.
Campos-Pons work often revolves around feminist ideologies. In an interview with Lynne Bell, she stated: "My work in Cuba looked at issues of sexuality, women's place in society, and the representation of women in the history of art".Bell, Lynne. "History of People Who Were Not Heroes: A Conversation with Maria Magdalena Campos‐Pons", pg. 33. As there was no larger feminist movement in Cuba, it was only through the expression of art through artists like Campos-Pon and others that feminism was kept in the spotlight and popular consciousness.
In the 1990s, she explored her family's ties to slavery and the Santería tradition carried over by her Yoruba family members. Santería is a spiritual practice which was developed by African slaves in Cuba by combining influences from Yoruba and Roman Catholic religious systems. Santería is often referred to as a "woman's religion" as it is a religion shaped by women and practiced largely by women.Gutierrez, Eddy. "The Importance of Women in Santeria", Santeria Church of the Orishas. June 27, 2012. Accessed October 25, 2015. Campos-Pons uses Santería as a theme in her art to identify her Nigerian ancestry and Cuban heritage. She explores the rituals and symbols of Santería in some of her work from this time period. The Seven Powers Come by the Sea (1992) and The Seven Powers (1994) are installations that address slavery and make mention of various Yoruba gods and goddesses. During the 1990s sound became increasingly important in Campos-Pons' work and Leonard created electronic sound for all of her videos and installations. Sound for the installations often used Leonard's music incorporating fragments of Campos-Pons voice and field recordings, often heard via speakers that surrounded visitors.
After 1994, there was a shift in Campos-Pons's work, and it became somewhat ethnographic." This work is largely autobiographical and has tended to examine her ancestors' relationship with slavery and the sugar industry. Her work investigates "a felt history," through the intersection of "non-spoken narratives" and "resilient culture". She started using large-format photographs which were often arranged into diptychs, triptychs or other configurations. These works are reminiscent of works by Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems.
In the early 2000s, she returned to elements of abstraction and minimalism that were reminiscent of her early work, and admittedly influenced by her Cuban professor Antonio Vidal.
According to Campos-Pons' artist statement, her work "renders elements of personal history and persona that have universal relevance...My subjects are my Afro-Cuban relatives as well as myself...The salient tie to familiar and cultural history vastly expands for me the range of photographic possibilities." Campos-Pon is interested in showing "crosscultural" and "crossgenerational" themes dealing with race and gender as "expressed in symbols of matriarchy and maternity." Campos-Pons says: "Of merging ideas, merging of ethnicities, merging of traditions... I am as much black, Cuban, woman, Chinese. I am this tapestry of all of that, and the responses to that could be very complicated and could include even anguish and pain." Other ideas that her work explores includes exile, immigration, memory and Cuba itself.
Her art has been shown in scores of solo and group exhibitions, including solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; the Venice Biennale; the Johannesburg Biennial; the First Liverpool Biennial; the Dakar Biennale in Senegal; and the Guangzhou Triennial in China. Campos-Pons's work is in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Canada, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Fogg Art Museum.
Campos-Pons teaches at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, where she is the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair of Fine Arts. In 2020, and as a result of the nationwide social unrest, she launched "Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice", which is defined as a Vanderbilt University "trans-institutional series of virtual conversations and artistic collaborations focused on healing at a time of significant social unrest."
Her diptych photograph, The House was included in the 2022 exhibition Afro-Atlantic Histories at the National Gallery of Art.
Collaboration with Neil Leonard Between 1988 and 2018, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons and Neil Leonard created thirty-eight audio visual works together. By the time they met in 1988, Leonard had created sound for video installations and performances by Tony Oursler, Constance De Jong and Sam Durant. After meeting Leonard, sound became increasingly important in Campos-Pons's practice. She collaborated with Leonard to incorporate spoken word, music and field recordings into the work, and expand her practice to include time-based presentation. Leonard called on leading practitioners of Cuban religious music to play for their installation, video and performances including Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, Los Hermanos Arango, Ramon Garcia Perez (Afrocuba de Matanzas), Roman Diaz (Yoruba Andabo) and Oriente Lopez to perform with them.
Leonard created electroacoustic compositions for Campos-Pons' first film and videos, Rito de Iniciación (1988) and Baño Sagrado (1990) created as a result of a residency at Western Front, Vancouver. From 2010-2017, Campos-Pons created their most mature collaborations, balancing a sonic/visual content and ideas, and integrating the audio sources into sculptural components. During this period, Leonard focused on how global marketing impacted how we listen. His work with Campos-Pons included recordings and performances made in collaboration with butchers, bartenders, street criers, former dock workers and folkloric ensembles. Leonard and Campos-Pons' Installations and processions of this period were co-authored (commissioned, planned and executed as a team), including "Llego Fefa,"11 Bienal de Havana; "Habla Madre," Guggenheim Museum; "Alchemy of the Soul," Peabody Essex Museum; "Identified," Smithsonian Institution National Portrait Gallery, "53+1=54+1+55. Letter of the Year," 55th Venice Biennale; "Matanzas Sound Map" and "Bar Matanzas," documenta 14.Cotter, Holland. "María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Neil Leonard."The New York Times. The New York Times, September 26, 2013. Accessed October 25, 2015. These pieces shifted the focus from Campos-Pons' biographical narrative to the Campos-Pons' and Leonard's interests in exploring the invisible threads connecting disparate cultures in the Americas. Art critic Holland Cotter describes Leonard's composition for the Cuban Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale as a "haunting, rhythmic, chantlike score, secular spiritual music for a New World". Leonard's composition for their performance "Identified" (2016) at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery featured Leonard performing with multi-Grammy winning trumpeter Terence Blanchard, a folkloric Cuban ensemble and a jazz orchestra comprising students of the Duke Ellington School for the Arts. Musicians were located in the main atrium, stairwell and galleries and created a series of locations with unique sonic signatures that Campos-Pons wandered thought during the performance.
Art The following are some examples of some of Campos-Pons' art:
"53+1=54+1+55. Letter of the Year" from 2013, by María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Neil Leonard.
This work of art was displayed in the Cuban Pavilion during the Venice Biennale of 2013.Fernández-Torres, Jorge (2013). "La Pervesión de lo Clásico: Anarquía de los Relatos." Maretti Editore. p. 220. The work comprises 100 bird cages, 55 video players and 18 audio speakers. "Letter of the Year" addresses issues of home, migration, the necessity of finding and redefining the meaning of permanency and locality. Letter of the Year plays with two key sounds in Cuba today.