María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold includes over three decades of the artist’s work in photography, installation, video, painting, and performance. Hauntingly beautiful and emotionally charged, Behold shows how Campos-Pons’s layered identity as a Cuban woman with ancestral roots in the Yoruba culture of West Africa as well as in Spain and China inform her multimedia, sensorial artworks. Evoking the history of diaspora, displacement, and migration, as well as labor and race, and motherhood and spirituality, Behold invites us to join with the artist in the vital search for meaning and connectivity.
About the artist
Campos-Pons is the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair Professor of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University. In addition to her practice as an artist and professor, she has made a significant contribution to the larger art world and to Tennessee through her ongoing program Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice, which brings together scholars, critics, and artists from around the world in virtual seminars and physical artist interventions.
She was the consulting curator for the 2023 Tennessee Triennial, a statewide series of exhibitions addressing the theme of “Re-Pair”—art as a means of healing a broken society. 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.
This exhibition is organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum. The exhibition is curated by Carmen Hermo, former Associate Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum and Mazie Harris, Associate Curator, Department of Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum with Jenée-Daria Strand, former Curatorial Associate, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum.
Exhibition gallery
María Magdalena Campos-Pons (born Matanzas, Cuba, 1959). Secrets of the Magnolia Tree, 2021. Watercolor, ink, gouache, and digital printing on paper on panels; 3 parts: 132 x 90 in. overall. Museum of Modern Art, New York; Latin American and Caribbean Fund and gift of Ronnie Heyman, 2022. © María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Image courtesy of the artist
María Magdalena Campos-Pons (born Matanzas, Cuba, 1959). Red Composition (detail), from the series Los Caminos (The Path), 1997. Polaroid Polacolor Pro photographs; 3 parts: 37 × 29 in. each; 37 × 87 in. overall. Collection of Wendi Norris. © María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Image courtesy of the artist
María Magdalena Campos-Pons (born Matanzas, Cuba, 1959). Untitled, from the series Un Pedazo de Mar, 2019. Gouache, watercolor and graphite ink on paper; 30 × 22 in. Courtesy of the artist and Galleria Giampaolo Abbondio, Milan. © María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Image courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris
María Magdalena Campos-Pons (born Matanzas, Cuba, 1959). De Las Dos Aguas (Of the Two Waters), 2007. Polaroid Polacolor Pro photographs; 12 parts: approx. 80 x 90 in. overall. NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Florida; promised gift of David Horvitz and Francie Bishop Good. © María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Image courtesy of the artist
María Magdalena Campos-Pons (born Matanzas, Cuba, 1959) with Okwui Okpokwasili and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs; with the participation of Dell Marie Hamilton, Jana Harper, Samita Sinha, and Lisa E. Harris. Directed by Codie Elaine Oliver. Still from When We Gather (detail), 2021. Digital video. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco. © María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Image courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris
María Magdalena Campos-Pons (born Matanzas, Cuba, 1959) with Neil Leonard (born Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1959). Spoken Softly with Mama, from the series History of a People Who Were Not Heroes, 1998. 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. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, purchased 1999. © María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Neil Leonard. Image courtesy of the artists
Exhibition supporters
The Frist Art Museum is supported in part by
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