COLLECTION NAME:
Visual Resources Teaching Collection
mediaCollectionId
ArtArtHiAAH~7~7
Visual Resources Teaching Collection
Collection
true
Image Record ID:
aahi0003677
image_record_id
aahi0003677
Image Record ID
false
Work Title (display):
Spoken Softly With Mama
Image Title:
detail view
Work Dates (display):
1998
Work Dates type:
creation
Image Date (display):
2009-02-02
Work Creator (display):
Maria Campos-Pons (Cuban, active USA, born 1959)
Work Creator gender:
female
work_creator_or_agent_gender
female
Work Creator gender
false
Work Creator notes (display):
Cuban painter, photographer, installation and performance artist, active also in the USA. Campos-Pons studied at the Higher Institute of Art, Havana (198085). Initially a painter, her graduation show Acoplamientos (1985; Havana, HIA) was concerned with representations of the female body as a device for prohibition and control, and her early work focused on the role of women in society and their representation within the history of art. In 1988 she went to the USA as a visiting artist at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, and in 1991 she settled permanently in Boston. Using shaped canvases, her first works displayed an interest in the interrelationship between painting and three-dimensional media. While living in the USA she also expanded her interest in sculpture and installation to include elements of video and performance. Living abroad also brought her relationship to Cuba into sharper relief; work produced in the early 1990s addressed her own displacement in relation to the enforced migration of her ancestors as slaves, and the way in which an imagined Africa is collectively created in contemporary Cuba by story-telling, the cultivation of traditional medicinal plants and the practice of the Afro-Caribbean Santería religion. Using performance and video as a form of self-portraiture, another aspect of her practice focuses on her attempt to build a coherent identity as an Afro-Cuban woman living in the USA. With the aim of achieving simultaneity between performance and its immediate capture in the production of an unalterable image, her self-portraits employ large-format colour Polaroid photography, as in the diptych When I am Not Here/Estoy Alla (1996) and the Identity series (1996). The process of self-determination articulated through such works drew upon her concurrent interest in wider understandings of post-colonial identity, such as Fernando Ortiz' concept of 'transculturation' and Homi Bhaba's 'the in-between'. Campos-Pons' understanding of Cuban history begins with autobiography; the experiences and memories of her own family are a starting point from which to open up a wider representative space. The collaborative involvement of members of her family, supplying photographs and testimonies by telephone or letter, also transforms her work into a medium of communication that is in turn representative of a wider experience of exile amongst the Cuban diaspora. At the end of the 1990s Campos-Pons completed two parts of A History of People Who Were Not Heroes, a set of three interrelated installations initially conceived in 1993. The first part of the trilogy, Town Portrait (1998), was concerned with her home town of La Vega, which was founded as a sugar plantation. In the process of researching the work she discovered that her childhood apartment block was originally a slave barrack, and that she had grown up in the exact rooms that her great-great-grandfather had occupied when he was brought to the country from Nigeria. Reconstructing fragments of La Vega's walls, sugar factory, tower and well, she presented the town as a model of wider black experience in Cuba, where the descendents of slaves re-inhabit places connected to the history of slavery. The trilogy brings together concerns articulated within previous works. While Town Portrait examined the way in which the legacy of slavery continues to shape the lives of subsequent generations, Spoken Softly with Mama (1998) used domestic objects to evoke the particular community formed amongst her female family members. Sugar, an as yet unrealized work, will complete the trilogy by articulating her own apparently contradictory experience of encountering and understanding her home country in the process of departing from it. Campos-Pons became a faculty member of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, MA, (SMFA) and founding director of Gallery Artists Studio Projects (GASP), Brookline, MA. A survey exhibition of her work, Everything is Separated by Water, is to be held at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2007. (Isobel Whitelegg. "Campos-Pons, Maria Magdalena." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. 3 Feb. 2009 .)
Work Creator UCB affiliation (display):
visiting artist, Visiting Artist Program, 2002
Work Style Period:
20th century
work_styleperiod
20th century
Work Style Period
false
Work Style Period:
Contemporary
work_styleperiod
Contemporary
Work Style Period
false
Work Subject:
Spanish slave trade
subject
Spanish slave trade
Work Subject
false
Work Subject:
African-Cuban
subject
African-Cuban
Work Subject
false
Work Subject:
families (kinship groups)
subject
families (kinship groups)
Work Subject
false
Work Subject:
Cuba (nation)
subject
Cuba (nation)
Work Subject
false
Work Subject:
women (female humans)
subject
women (female humans)
Work Subject
false
Work Subject:
mothers
subject
mothers
Work Subject
false
Work Subject:
slave trade
subject
slave trade
Work Subject
false
Work Subject:
children (people by age group)
subject
children (people by age group)
Work Subject
false
Work Subject:
memory
subject
memory
Work Subject
false
Work Worktype:
sculpture (visual works)
work_type
sculpture (visual works)
Work Worktype
false
Work Category (VRC classification):
sculptures and installations
work_category__ucbaahvrc_classification_
sculptures and installations
Work Category (VRC classification)
false
Work Material and Technique (display):
mixed media
Work Location (Repository or Site) name:
National Gallery of Canada
Work Location (Repository or Site) role:
repository
Work Location (Geographic) name:
Ottawa, Canada
Image Rights (display):
© Maria M. Campos-Pons
Work Rights (display):
© Maria M. Campos-Pons
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Holding Institution:
University of Colorado at Boulder
Collection:
Art and Art History Visual Resources Collection
Collection info and contact:
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