We are pleased to announce our second exhibition of Cuban born artist Maria
Magdalena Campos Pons. Her ovure is a rich exploration into African diaspora
and notions of loss, separation and dislocation associated with her Afro-Cuban
identity. The Other Side follows her major mid-career survey organized
by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The show continues to reflect her interest
in memory and displacement with two new unique nine-panel Polaroid works
and several large-scale works on paper. For Campos-Pons, the immediacy of
the Polaroid process allows her to respond and perform within the studio.
In the work Blue Refuge, Campos-Pons incorporated painted constructions
and sculpture into her performance. Fixed in the center panel a figure sits
wrapped in an orange cloth. The expansive blue background references both
winter landscape and sea, while a web of strings ground the figure in space.
Aestically, the contrasting colors of orange and blue isolate the form,
while also envolping it into the calming environment. The body is used to
reference history, personal identity and is both literally and figuratively
bound to the landscape. In contrast, Dreaming of an Island is a work
on paper that references to the longing of another place.
Born in Matanzas in 1959, Campos-Pons was educated in Cuba at the National
School of Art (1976-1979) and Instituto Superior de Arte (1980-1985) and
graduated from Massachusetts College of Art in 1988. She is one of the most
significant artists to emerge from the post-Revolutionary era. She moved
to North America in 1991 and now lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with
her husband and son where they Co-founded GASP. The retrospective Everything
is Separated by Water at the Insianapolis Museum of Art included forty
works in many mediums borrowed from collections at The Art Institute of
Chicago, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Fine Arts in
Boston, the National Gallery of Canada and the Norton Museum in Miami. Copies
of the monograph with scholarly essays by curator Lisa Freiman and Okwui
Enwezor are available.
Survey 1997-2008 [view
images]