María Magdalena Campos-Pons

Abstract

Verse Three, María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Identities, surveys the work of the Cuban-born artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons, who creates complex multimedia designs and presentations, including sculptures, installations, photographs, videos, and performances. Campos-Pons’s ceremonial movements in Habla LAMADRE at the Guggenheim Museum, in Alchemy of the Soul: María Magdalena Campos-Pons at the Peabody Essex Museum, and in Identified at the National Portrait Gallery articulate her own vision of the world in ways that interweave the worlds of Afro-Cuba and the United States seamlessly. Campos-Pons works skillfully to document the bittersweet history, or historia agridulce, of sugar, enslaved laborers, suffering, and, ultimately, death, by means of performance, visuality, and sound aesthetics. Chronicling the African diasporic visual languages through a Black woman’s body that performs for the Black gaze allows for an intellectual freedom to witness and to provide a personal testimony for how sonic interventions of the Black body can exist and intervene in contemporary art museum practices.