When she was young, Campos relates that during a trip to the National Cuban Museum of Fine Art, she distinctly felt that black Cubans were conspicuously missing from the art. She did not feel as though black Cubans were equally represented. Campos-Pons has described much of her art education as very traditional, rooted in drawing and sculpture. She trained at the Escuela National de Arte in Havana between 1976 and 1979. From 1980 to 1989, she attended Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA). The ISA allowed students to be exposed to international artistic movements and develop art that drew from Cuba’s unique “mixed traditions and cultures.” Her ISA painting professor Antonio Vidal, a Cuban abstractionist, had a lasting impact on her work as a painter and she presented his work, along with her work with Neil Leonard at documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany. Campos-Pons conducted her post graduate studies at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1988. While there, she created her first film that was scored by composer, saxophonist, Neil Leonard, whom she married in 1989. Before moving to Boston in 1991 to live with Leonard, she took a fellowship in Banff, Alberta. Since 2017, she has lived in Nashville, Tennessee. Career Between 1986 and 1989 Campos-Pons was professor of Painting and Aesthetic at the Instituto Superior de Arte. She started exhibiting internationally in 1984. In the late 1980s, her artwork gained “international recognition” with her abstract paintings dealing with female sexuality. Her work coincides with the rise of the New Cuban Art movement. The New Cuban Art movement began as a reaction against the repressive aspects of the Cuban state and the introduction of conceptual art. The movement was less focused on technical skill and more on creating an art that was genuinely Cuban. A large part of this artistic movement was the introduction of Afro-Cuban presence, both as artists and within the art itself. Humor and spirituality were major themes in New Cuban Art. Her early work, often consisting of separate, shaped canvases, suggested fragmentation of the female self and referenced AfroCuban myths. She also explored reproductive rights and feminism through her art. Campos Pons work often revolves around feminist ideologies. Her work in Cuba focused on feminist themes. Since there was not a larger feminism movement in Cuba, it was only through the expression of art through artists like Campos-Pon and others that feminism was kept in the spotlight and popular consciousness. After 1994, there was a shift in Campos-Pons’s work, and it became somewhat ethnographic. “This work is largely autobiographical and has tended to examine her ancestors’ relationship with slavery and the sugar industry. CamposPon’s work investigates “a felt history,” through the intersection of “non-spoken narratives” and “resilient culture”. She started using largeformat photographs which were often arranged into diptychs, triptychs or other configurations. These works are reminiscent of works by Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems. In the early 2000s, Campos-Pons returned to elements of abstraction and minimalism that were reminiscent of her early work, and admittedly influenced by her Cuban professor Antonio Vidal. According to Campos-Pons’ artist statement, her work “renders elements of personal history and persona that have universal relevance... My subjects are my Afro-Cuban relatives as well as myself...The salient tie to familiar and cultural history vastly expands for me the range of photographic possibilities.”Campos-Pon is interested in showing “cross-cultural” and “cross generational” themes dealing with race and gender as “expressed in symbols of matriarchy and maternity. The URBAN EXPERIENCE | 2021 11
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