Detail View: Visual Resources Teaching Collection: Spoken Softly With Mama

aahi0003677

Spoken Softly With Mama

detail view

1998

creation

2009-02-02

Maria Campos-Pons (Cuban, active USA, born 1959)

female

Cuban painter, photographer, installation and performance artist, active also in the USA. Campos-Pons studied at the Higher Institute of Art, Havana (1980–85). 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 .)

visiting artist, Visiting Artist Program, 2002

20th century

Contemporary

Spanish slave trade

African-Cuban

families (kinship groups)

Cuba (nation)

women (female humans)

mothers

slave trade

children (people by age group)

memory

sculpture (visual works)

sculptures and installations

mixed media

National Gallery of Canada

repository

Ottawa, Canada

© Maria M. Campos-Pons

© Maria M. Campos-Pons

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