Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, “Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold” at the Brooklyn Museum
September 15, 2023 to January 14, 2024
Other venues: First Museum of Art, Nashville, Tennessee; Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
For more than thirty years, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons has used her body as a vessel in performance, photography, sculptural installations, collages, and videos. The recipient of a 2023 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the artist explores motherhood, family’s transnational legacy, and the hidden histories that surround her in different ways, using objects and locations from her native Cuba to speak to a generation’s pain of enslavement memory. Keep it up today. In her diverse body of work, she shows how the past is woven into us, the people we hold dear and the objects we collect.
Talk softly to mom (1998) is an installation originally staged for the Museum of Modern Art that crystallizes many of the themes that Campos-Pons has focused on over the years. In this installation, co-created with jazz musician Neil Leonard, Campos-Pons uses videos of herself, blown-up photos of her family, ironing boards and irons to speak to black women A tribute to the long history of working as a domestic worker. , these characters have precedents in slavery. She preserved this often-overlooked history and transformed the space into something akin to an altar. The irons intentionally evoke the shapes of the ships used to transport enslaved Africans abroad, suggesting that these women are inseparable from centuries-old horrors.
The work served as the entry point for Campos-Pons’s recent retrospective. Organized by the Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition clearly demonstrates how Campos-Pons’s art revels in the complexities of identity. The works on display, drawn from across decades, illustrate how Campos-Pons relies to varying degrees on her Afro-Cuban ancestry; her family has Yoruba, Chinese and Spanish ancestry; Priest’s life; and the artist’s time living in Boston and more recently in Nashville, Tennessee, where she currently serves as chair of the art department at Vanderbilt University. Campos-Pons blends all these aspects of her ancestry and then presents herself as multiple, as she often does in photographic installations composed of many prints featuring her own images.
Her most recent work has turned the focus to the natural world, with her triptych The Secret of the Magnolia Tree (2021) includes photographs of trees she encountered in Nashville. Campos-Pons paints herself in these reprints, looking upward, as if she is still searching to understand what the trees have witnessed over the years.
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Honorable Mention: Judith F. Baca, “Paintings from the River of Angels: Judith F. Baca and the Great Wall,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art (October 26, 2023 to July 21, 2024)
Judith F. Baca’s largest work to date, both in scale and ambition, is Great Wall of Los Angeles (1974-present), a sprawling mural along the Tujunga River (a coordinated area through which the Los Angeles River once flowed) depicts the history of California and the United States, placing women, queer people, and people of color in Front and center. She worked over several summers with a group of at-risk youth under the supervision of the Social and Public Art Resource Center, which Baca co-founded in the 1970s, to paint the mural’s images that highlight historical Events such as the arrival of the Spanish from Spain. Indigenous perspectives as well as the arrival of various immigrant groups in Los Angeles, the deportation of Mexican Americans, and the internment of Japanese Americans. It goes far beyond the walls of any institution.
Between 2023 and 2024, LACMA will temporarily serve as a studio for Baca and her collaborators as they continue to paint new sections Great Wall In the gallery for all to see. (The Mellon Foundation recently provided $5 million to SPARC to expand Great WallThe images blend into the present and dialogue with the existing panels. ) The 1961 Freedom Riders painting was made here. The exhibition proves that even as mainstream institutions were slow to provide support for her artistic vision, Baca still helped create an important part of Los Angeles visual culture. This exhibition is a step toward acknowledging her impact on art history.
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