What My Mother Told Me... The Art of Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, a woman, an expatriate, and a Cuban, makes art about identity and memory. Like all good art that begins in the personal, her work echoes the lives of African descendants rooted in Cuba, and of legions of fellow travelers from around the world at the turn of the 21st century. Born in Cuba of Nigerian ancestry, Campos-Pons' work of the last 20 years covers an extended range of visual language investigations. It emerges from the early 1980s focus on painting and the discussion of sexuality in the crossroads of Cuban mixed cultural heritage to incisive questioning, critique and insertion of the black body in the contemporary narratives of the present. Installation art, performative photography and cultural activism define the core of Campos-Pons' practice of the last two decades.

Always in the art of Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, there is a balance between the story, the content of the work, and her delight in the aesthetic and technical explorations she undertakes. She considers herself to be a painter and she makes color choices in the objects and videos used in the work, but she adds the elements of time and dimension to her imagery. She revels in the nature of the sculptural materials she selects, the transparency of glass, and the addition of time and movement with videos and the movement of viewers through works. She is telling layered complex, extended, improvised stories about her family, herself, her Cuban being and the passions in her life.