“Campos-Pons says: “Of merging ideas, merging of ethnicities, merging of traditions... I am as much black, Cuban, woman, Chinese. I am this tapestry of all of that, and the responses to that could be very complicated and could include even anguish and pain.” Other ideas that her work explores includes exile, immigration, memory, and Cuba itself. Her art has been shown in scores of solo and group exhibitions, including solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; the Venice Biennale; the Johannesburg Biennial; the First Liverpool Biennial; the Dakar Biennale in Senegal; and the Guangzhou Triennial in China. Campos-Pons’s work is in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Canada, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, the Miami Art Museum and the Fogg Art Museum. Campos-Pons currently teaches at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 2020, and as a result of the nationwide social unrest, she launched “Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice”, which is defined as a Vanderbilt University “trans-institutional series of virtual conversations and artistic collaborations focused on healing at a time of significant social unrest.” In an article by Holland Cotter, he writes about an exhibit where Campos-Pons was also featured - “American slavery — what it did, what it is still doing — remains an incendiary topic, as racial discrimination becomes subtler, harder to pin down, played out along lines of class and economics. The topic has also gained importance with the developing diaspora-consciousness of the last few decades, embodied here in a photograph by Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons of herself and her mother, Cubans of African descent. Although the two women stand apart, each holds one end of a single long, knotted strand of colored beads. It isn’t a heavy, binding chain; it’s a connecting thread, linking generations through a mutual history. That history was cruel; the emotions it raises are complicated and changing. But its reality, revisited and rethought, can be a source of power rather than depletion. Ms. CamposPons
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