Through tactile and layered works that span photography, immersive installation, video, painting, and performance, Behold presents a selection of the four-decade career of María Magdalena Campos-Pons. In this sweeping, multisensory survey, the artist engages with her performance-based practice and work with communities in Cuba, Boston, and Nashville, her current residence, to explore complex narratives rooted in interconnected histories, identities, and realities.
The presentation features more than forty artworks, bringing together significant career highlights and new work, along with a multimedia series on view for the first time in the United States. The artist has been included in major exhibitions worldwide, including the Sharjah Biennial (2023), Documenta 14 (2017), Venice Biennale (2013, 2001), Havana Biennial (2012, 2019, 1991, 1989), the Guangzhou Triennial (2008), her traveling mid-career survey Everything Is Separated by Water (2007), the Dak’Art Biennial in Dakar (2004), and more, as well as numerous university and college museum presentations, speaking to her influence as an educator, thinker, and experimental artist. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication designed by Morcos Key, documenting the span of Campos-Pons’s career, with essays by Carmen Hermo, Mazie Harris, Jenée-Daria Strand, Phillip Townsend, and Selene Wendt, as well as an introduction by artist and cultural theorist Amalia Mesa-Bains.
Campos-Pons has often foreseen broader cultural shifts through her work, evidenced by her deep explorations of labor and motherhood, the connected histories of enslavement, the power and fragility of nature, and Santería spirituality, ritual, and tradition. She considers the legacies of enslavement and the ongoing exploitation of Afro-descendent people, especially women and migrants in Matanzas (Cuba), Boston, Nashville, and Padua (Italy), and how such realities encompass the artist’s own family story. Behold differentiates between the camera’s voyeuristic ability to objectify its subject and the way in which Campos-Pons uses the medium to witness in a careful act of beholding. The exhibition’s title evokes associations of touch, support, and dignity, as the artist beholds and upholds myriad stories, experiences, and communities.
“It’s a delight to showcase this survey of Campos-Pons’s artwork. Her work is conceptually rigorous, avant-garde, wondrous, and beautiful. It embraces traditions and ways of being that preceded and survived the violences of colonialism, and it will appeal to viewers seeking decolonial narratives and inspiration from an artist who affirms that empathy and emotion are critical tools,” says Carmen Hermo, Associate Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum.
Born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1959, the year Fidel Castro came to power, Campos-Pons grew up during a time of experimentation and artistic freedom in post-Revolution Cuba. In response to the harshening political climate, the artist moved to the United States in 1991 and was unable to return to Cuba for many years. Her artwork has often visualized the difficulties of being in multiple places at once: working and living in one place while the difficulties of being in multiple places at once: working and living in one place while being emotionally tethered to another, striving throughout for connection across distance. Campos-Pons’s family story intertwines global histories of enslavement, indentured and domestic labor, and advocacy for bodily autonomy. Her artwork centers these histories, including her West African Yoruba ancestors’ forced enslavement in the these histories, including her West African Yoruba ancestors’ forced enslavement in the indentured servants in nearby sugar mills.
In honor of the exhibition’s opening, the Museum will hold a daylong symposium during the opening weekend. The program will begin with poetry by performance artist Pamela Sneed; followed by a keynote conversation with renowned art historian Cheryl Finley; two roundtables reflecting on the artist’s practice in relation to lineage and ancestry and to mentorship and legacy (moderated by art historians Adriana Zavala and Nikki A. Greene); and a culminating new processional performance by the artist, which will lead participants from the symposium into the exhibition.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold is organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum. It is curated by Carmen Hermo, Associate Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, and Mazie Harris, Assistant Curator of Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum, with Jenée-Daria Strand, former Curatorial Associate, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition begins a national tour that includes the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tennessee; and the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, California.
Generous support is provided by Debbie and Mitchell Rechler, Jodi and Hal Hess, and the Elizabeth A. Sackler Museum Educational Trust.
