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 Spain and China has gifted her with compassion and empathy for a wide spectrum of humanity. Evoking the history of diaspora and present-day realities of cultural displacement, labor and race, and motherhood and spirituality, Behold invites us to join with the artist in the vital search for meaning and connectivity.
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, Associate Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum and Mazie Harris, Assistant Curator, Department of Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum with Jenée-Daria Strand, former Curatorial Associate, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum
Presented in part by
