María Magdalena Campos Pons facts for kids

María Magdalena Campos-Pons (born July 22, 1959) is a Cuban-born artist who now lives in Nashville, Tennessee. She is known for creating art using photography, performance, video with sound, and sculpture. Many people see her as a very important artist from Cuba who developed her style after the Cuban Revolution.

Her art explores many powerful ideas. She looks at Cuban culture, what it means to be a woman, and her own multicultural identity. Her family background is a mix of Cuban, Chinese, and Nigerian heritage. She also explores her family life and spirituality, especially Roman Catholicism and Santería.

Early Life and Learning

Campos-Pons was born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1959. She grew up in a town called La Vega, which was built around a sugar plantation. Her family history is a big part of her art. Her great-grandparents on her father's side were Yoruba people from Nigeria. She also has Chinese and Hispanic family members.

Her African ancestors were brought to Cuba as enslaved people in the 1800s to work on sugar plantations. They passed down their traditions from Africa, which deeply influenced Campos-Pons's art. Her Chinese relatives came to Cuba as workers in the sugar mills.

When she was young, Campos-Pons visited the National Cuban Museum of Fine Art. She noticed that there was very little art that showed Black Cubans. She felt that Afro-Cubans were not being represented fairly in the art world.

Campos-Pons's art education was very traditional at first, focusing on drawing and sculpture. She studied at top art schools in Havana, Cuba. At the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), she was able to learn about art from all over the world. This helped her create art that was unique to Cuba's mixed culture.

In 1988, she did further studies at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. There, she made her first film with music by composer Neil Leonard, whom she married a year later. She moved to Boston in 1991 and later taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Since 2017, she has lived in Nashville, Tennessee.

Her Artistic Career

Campos-Pons began teaching art in Cuba and started showing her work around the world in 1984. In the late 1980s, her paintings about womanhood became famous internationally. Her work was part of a new art movement in Cuba that focused on creating art that was truly Cuban. This movement also brought more attention to Afro-Cuban artists and culture.

Her art often explores ideas about the role of women in society. Since there was not a large feminist movement in Cuba, artists like Campos-Pons used their work to keep these important conversations going.

In the 1990s, she began to explore her family's connection to slavery and the Santería tradition. Santería is a spiritual practice that was created by enslaved Africans in Cuba. They blended their Yoruba beliefs with Roman Catholic traditions. Campos-Pons uses Santería in her art to connect with her Nigerian and Cuban roots. During this time, sound became a key part of her art, and her husband Neil Leonard created soundscapes for her videos and installations.

After 1994, her work became more personal. She began to examine her family's history with slavery and the sugar industry. She started using large photographs, often arranged in sets of two or three, to tell these stories.

Campos-Pons says her work is about "merging of ideas, merging of ethnicities, merging of traditions." She explores themes like leaving one's home country, immigration, and memory. Her art has been shown in major museums all over the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Venice Biennale.

Working with Neil Leonard

From 1988 to 2018, María Magdalena Campos-Pons and her husband, Neil Leonard, worked together on 38 projects that combined art and sound. After they met, sound became a very important part of her work. Leonard helped her add spoken words, music, and recorded sounds to her art.

They worked with famous Cuban musicians to bring religious and traditional music into their art. Their later work together explored how different cultures in the Americas are connected in unseen ways. For one project at the Venice Biennale, a famous art critic described Leonard's music as "haunting, rhythmic... spiritual music for a New World."

Examples of Her Art

Here are a few of her well-known art pieces:

• "53+1=54+1+55. Letter of the Year" (2013)

This piece, made with Neil Leonard, was shown at the Venice Biennale. It included 100 birdcages, 55 video players, and 18 speakers. The artwork explores ideas of home and moving to new places. Inside the cages, videos showed conversations between Cubans and their family members living in other countries.

• "Spoken Softly with Mama" (1998)

This artwork uses sculpture, photos, video, and sound to explore her African and Cuban roots. It looks at themes of race, family, and history. The piece tells the stories of her family and neighbors in Cuba, connecting them to the generations of Africans brought there long ago.

• "Matanzas Sound Map" (2017)

Created with Neil Leonard for a major art show called Documenta 14, this piece explores the sounds of her hometown, Matanzas. It includes video and 10 different sound channels. The work creates a "sound map" of the city, from its harbors to its quiet natural areas.

Public Collections

Her work is part of the collections of many famous museums, including:

• Pérez Art Museum Miami
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Smithsonian Institution
• Whitney Museum of American Art
• Art Institute of Chicago
• National Gallery of Canada
• Victoria and Albert Museum
• Fogg Art Museum, at Harvard University

Awards

Campos-Pons has received many awards for her art. Here are some of them:

• 2023: MacArthur Fellow
• 2021: $50,000 Pérez Prize
• 2018: $25,000 Anonymous Was a Woman Award
• 2007: Rappaport Prize
• 1997: The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant
• 1995: Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe College, Harvard University
• 1989: Medal of Honor, City of Guanabacoa, Cuba

Solo Exhibitions

Campos-Pons has had many solo shows, where only her art is displayed. Some major ones include:

• 2023: María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold, Brooklyn Museum and J. Paul Getty Museum
• 2017: Matanzas Sound Map, documenta 14, Athens and Kassel, Germany (with Neil Leonard)
• 2013: Water, WIZARD GALLERY, Milan
• 2010: Sugar, Smith College Museum of Art
• 2007: Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons: Everything Is Separated by Water, Bass Museum, Miami
• 2004: Threads of Memory, Dak'Art, the Biennial of Contemporary African Art, Senegal
• 1998: Spoken Softly with Mama, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
• 1991: A Woman at the border/Una Mujer en la Frontera, SOHO 20 Gallery, New York
• 1989: Isla/Island, Castillo de la Fuerza, Havana, Cuba

See also

In Spanish: María Magdalena Campos Pons para niños