April 17, 2025
María Magdalena Campos-Pons
Behold
The J. Paul Getty Museum
February 18 - May 4, 2025

María Magdalena Campos-Pons
Behold, is a survey of works by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, a Cuban born and Nashville based multi-media artist whose complex works examine themes ranging from migration to motherhood. Though not widely exhibited in California, Campos-Pons has been making installations, performances and 2D-works for more than thirty years and is also a well respected professor. She has been on the visual arts faculty at Vanderbilt University since 2017 when she relocated there after teaching for twenty-five years at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Behold is a traveling exhibition organized by curators at the Getty and Brooklyn Museums. Its final stop in Los Angeles comes after its debut at the Brooklyn Museum (September 2023 - January 2024), as well as presentations at The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC (February - June 2024) and the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN (September 2024- January 2025).
On view are photographs, videos, paintings, sculptures and installations that interweave Campos-Pons's interests and unique ways of compositing imagery to create allegories and historical narratives that bring together important people, places and times throughout the artist's life. The multi-panel Umbilical Cord (1991) employs a long piece of wire that connects twelve individually framed sepia-toned photographs of outstretched arms and midsections of women from the artist's extended family. Spoken Softly with Mama (1998) is a mixed-media installation that reflects on garment work and laundry. Printed onto fabric and wrapped around three ironing boards are what appear to be old family photos of Cuban women. These ironing boards stand upright and are set deep in a darkened space. The floor surrounding them is covered with spot lit irons and trivets made of glass that seem to float in the darkness and become a metaphor for the boats that forcibly carried numerous Africans to the Americas. Videos are also projected onto the remaining three ironing boards; in one, Campos-Pons folds a long cloth referencing women's work. While a commentary on domestic duties by enslaved workers, Spoken Softly with Mama is also a celebration of life, like many of Campos-Pons's pieces.
Dualities are pervasive within Campos-Pons's work. She often examines the self (herself) in relation to family and heritage. In the late 1990s while a student at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Campos-Pons began to use the Polaroid 20 x 24 instant camera. Rather than make single images, she designed complex grids featuring numerous Polaroids resulting in larger finished pieces, but also illustrating her ability to conceptualize and produce interesting relationships across fragmented imagery— literally cutting apart and reconstituting the body. Replenishing (2001) is a seven part Polaroid, hung in an H-like configuration, that depicts the artist and her mother as separate, framed, vertical triptychs. Campos-Pons and her mother are dressed in long, formal and elegant dresses. The middle image of the portraits contain their hands each casually holding the end of a long strand of beads. In the central image of the piece, Campos-Pons focuses on where the beads are knotted together, emphasizing the mother daughter connection.
While the exhibition contains captivating examples of Campos-Pons's multi-panel drawings, videos and large-scale sculptures made from Murano glass, it is her large grids of Polaroids that stand out and speak most directly to her investigations into feminism, kinship and memory. Single photographs stand out, such as The Right Protection (1999) in which the artist is depicted with hand-drawn eyes covering her back both seeing and not seeing us simultaneously.
But, it is in the sixteen-panel work Elevata (2002), the twelve-panel photograph De Las Dos Aguas (2007) and the most impressive twenty-eight panel Polaroid Finding Balance (2015) that Campos-Pons links present to past. In Finding Balance, Campos-Pons draws from her Cuban, Chinese, and Nigerian ancestry. Here she is depicted in white face wearing a black and gold robe decorated with what appears to be a monster or demon. Making up many of the 28 different framed images around her are photographs of bird cages, knotted fabrics and red rectangles shot against a mottled-blue background. Long strands of braided hair weave through the composition literally tying together different cultures and time frames.
None of Campos-Pons's complex pieces are a quick read. She questions everything and takes nothing for granted. Her process is both labor intensive and social. While formally elegant and conceptually rigorous, these works are also extremely personal. She traces ideas about home and home-land, looking at where she came from (Cuba) in relation to where she now resides (Nashville, TN), She also sees things through a feminist perspective as well as that of a displaced person. She engages with those around her and looks back to where she was born and grew up (Matanzas) as a way to connect with others who share her racial heritage, as well as those who do not. In her magnificent works, she connects. Campos-Pons uses fragments to weave together stories, histories and materials that situate herself as a solid entity in an ever changing work.
Click here for María Magdalena Campos-Pons on its own page.