Embroidered silk and organza over ironing boards with photographic transfers, embroidered cotton sheets, pâte de verre irons and trivets, wooden benches, six projected video tracks by Campos-Pons with stereo sound by Leonard; 336 × 341 in. overall. © María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Neil Leonard. (Image source: https://fristartmuseum.org/exhibition/maria-magdalena-campos-pons/#)
Over the last two weeks, I endeavoured to share the work of two daughters of our soil who although they reside elsewhere (in the United States) remain connected and relevant to Guyana. In Suchitra Mattai, we have an artist who has foregrounded her family’s history and by extension our collective national patrimony. Meanwhile, in Keisha Scarville we have an artist who in negotiating personal loss has reminded us that we are more than our ethno-racial political histories and baggage. Scarville underscored the intrinsic humanity of women ‘othered’ because of gender and race.
With both Mattai and Scarville, I tried to have their words represent them. Today, I wish to extend beyond our Guyanese Diaspora to a Caribbean artist who like Mattai and Scarville, leans heavily on the histories of her family – especially the women within its units, and memory. As a consequence, she encourages us to consider the forgotten threads of lineage and to appreciate the richness of the lives and journeys that are within our DNA. Through her work she reminds us to connect and re-connect with the essence of our individual and collective humanity. In sharing about this sister of our Caribbean, I will lean on her interlocutors. I will also reference only one work from her vast oeuvre that stretches decades and to which she continuously contributes.
Maria Magdelena Campos-Pons (b. 1959) is a Cuban-born artist who now resides in the United States, but has called Canada home. In New Art of Cuba (2003) Luis Camnitzer writes that while her early work drew on parallels between the Bible and the Mayan Popul Vuh (a literary text encapsulating the Mayan worldview), later works have drawn on a wide spectrum of sources. Additionally, he writes, “Her narrative ideology is a product of the stories provided by the many cultural streams that converge in Cuba over the centuries.” Campos-Pons has drawn on colonialism, the belief system and rituals of Santería (her grandmother was a priestess), her multicultural origins (having Yoruba/African, Spanish, and Chinese ancestry), her migratory existence (living, studying and working in diverse cultural spaces), feelings of displacement, her journey of mothering and being mothered, and acts of caring and collective healing.
In Spoken Softly with Mama (1998, co-created with Neil Leonard), Campos-Pons draws inspiration from the women within her lineage whose labouring and caring were her fount, enlarging notions of the kinds of gestures to be elevated as heroic. The work is a multimedia immersive installation, which brings together domestic objects (irons, ironing boards, and textiles), video projections, photography, light, and sound. “It speaks to female subjectivity as it celebrates the supportive and matrilineal relationships among women and the labour relegated to Black women in Cuba as laundresses and domestics but also critiques the gendered and racial ideologies that undergird the conventional public monument” (Hart). The work in both its form and content insists on a recall of uncomfortable history (the transatlantic slave trade, plantation slavery) and stimulates cultural memory embedded in one’s DNA. “[Campos-Pons] also destabilizes the notion of fixed identities—national, ethnic, and personal—by showing how all identities are multiple, interconnected, interactive, and varied across time” (Hart).
From 15 September 2023 to 14 January 2024 “María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold” was on view at the Brooklyn Museum, New York City. Behold was the first solo of a Cuban-Woman artist at the Brooklyn Museum and Campos-Pons’s first major New York exhibition. It was also her first multimedia survey since 2007. The exhibition subsequently traveled to the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee where Campos-Pons currently resides. Behold is currently at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles from 18 February to 4 May 2025. This marks the first exhibition on the US West Coast to offer audiences the breadth of Campos-Pons’s work.
According to the Brooklyn Museum’s Press Release, more than forty artworks were featured, bringing together significant career highlights and new work. As one of the exhibition curators noted, “[Campos-Pons’s] work is conceptually rigorous, avant-garde, wondrous, and beautiful. It embraces traditions and ways of being that preceded and survived the violences of colonialism, and it will appeal to viewers seeking decolonial narratives and inspiration from an artist who affirms that empathy and emotion are critical tools.”
The release further notes. “Campos-Pons’s calling as an artist coalesced with the emergence of the feminist language of intersectionality, a framework first introduced by Black feminist scholars and thinkers in the late 1980s. She foregrounded the inseparability of race, gender, and sexuality in her representations of the women in her family, considering spiritual practice, labor, and migration as modes of interpreting loss and connection.”
Campos-Pons graduated in 1980 from the National School of Art in Havana, Cuba. She went on to study painting at Havana’s Universidad de las Artes (ISA). In 1988, she earned an MFA in Media Arts from Boston’s Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
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In 2023, Campos-Pons was named a MacArthur Fellow in recognition of her groundbreaking synthesis of cultures and mediums in advocating for art’s capacity to heal individuals and society. She is the recipient of many other awards. Her work has been exhibited in several prestigious exhibitions and is in many of art’s premier institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); Art Institute of Chicago; Victoria and Albert Museum (London); and the Pérez Art Museum (Miami).
Additional reference: Hart, David C. Spoken Softly with Mama. Canadian Art Review, 2022, Vol. 47, No. 2.
