Opening on September 15 at the Brooklyn Museum (200 Eastern Pkwy, Brooklyn), María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold, organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum and curated by Carmen Hermo, is the first multimedia survey of the artist’s work since 2007. It presents a selection of her sensorial and layered productions in a four-decade career through span photography, immersive installation, video, painting, and performance. It highlights the artist’s commitment in creating new modes of understanding, as well as her engagement with both historical and present-day challenges.
Viewers will be transported across geographies, mediums, and spiritual practices.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons was born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1959. She is an experimental artist, through her work she pushed existing boundaries and genre definitions by representing three communities she got in touch with in Cuba, Boston, and Nashville, where she currently lives. Her art deals with multicultural identities, interracial families, women labor and motherhood; power and fragility of nature; histories of enslavement, migration, diaspora, and memory as well as Santería spirituality and ritual.
Events to be held during the opening weekend, on September 16 and 17: a daylong symposium featuring a critical grounding with renowned art historian Cheryl Finley; poetry by performance artist Pamela Sneed; two roundtables reflecting on the artist’s practice in relation to place and ancestry and legacy moderated by art historians Adriana Zavala and Nikki A. Greene in addition to a culminating new performance by Campos-Pons herself, titled “A Mother’s River of Tears”.
