María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Dreaming of an Island

Sept. 10 – Dec. 6, 2008

Throughout her distinguished 20-year career, María Magdalena Campos-Pons (b. 1959) has created a unique body works that examine her ancestral displacement from Africa, her self-imposed exile from Cuba, and her experiences as an Afro-Cuban women living in North America. María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Dreaming of an Island, featured bold large-format Polaroid photographs, mixed-media installations, and videos that explore personal and national identity, cultural complexities, and socioeconomic politics.

Since she emerged on the international art scene in the 1980s, her work has raised larger questions about the broader geopolitical implications of race, gender, and ethnicity. By revisiting themes such as water, hair, umbilical cords, orishas (Yoruba deities), and self-portraiture, she illuminates her complex personal world view.

Campos-Pons’s work has been featured in many prominent exhibitions: Spoken Softly with Mama at the Museum of Modern Art (1998); the 49th Venice Bienale (2001); and in the mid-career retrospective María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Everything is Separated by Water (2007), which was organized by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Dreaming of an Island, the artist’s first solo exhibition of Campos-Pons’s work in Georgia, was an original exhibition curated by Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, Ph.D., the director of the museum.