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Lot Essay
“Who is the other? What is center? What is periphery?” asks Campos-Pons. “My work really tries to contest and to contextualize the discourse of what it means to be a Cuban woman who happens to be black” (in W. Luis, “Art and Diaspora: A Conversation with María Magdalena Campos-Pons,” Afro-Hispanic Review 30, no. 2, Fall 2011, p. 156). Born of African, Cuban, and Chinese heritage on a sugar plantation in Matanzas, Campos-Pons graduated from Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte in 1985 and earned an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art in 1988. Since immigrating to the United States in 1991, she has evolved a diverse, multimedia practice informed by Afro-Cuban history and religion; race, ethnicity, and gender; and memory and migration. Campos-Pons has exhibited at major international venues—the Venice Biennale, the Dakar Biennale, Documenta—and her acclaimed retrospective, María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold, will conclude its national tour at the J. Paul Getty Museum this spring.
“Campos-Pons is heir to the fraught history of the Middle Passage,” observes critic Okwui Enwezor, noting her descent from the Yoruba people of Nigeria through her great-grandparents, who were brought to Cuba in the mid-1800s. “She has submitted the weight of its historical and theoretical possibilities to some of the most trenchant, poetic, and radically introspective artistic reflection on the displaced agency of Africans in the Americas.” Enwezor locates a “diasporic imagination” in the “series of performance-oriented Polaroid photographs,” including Bin Bin Lady: Dakar Swatch, that “directly referenc[e] the iconography of Yoruba and Afro-Cuban imagery.” Drawing upon the “meaning and power of transculturation,” he continues, “she deployed self-portraiture as a dialectical form of self-ethnography, incisively using her body as a site of mapping and reading difference and identity” (“The Diasporic Imagination: The Memory Works of María Magdalena Campos-Pons,” María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Everything is Separated by Water, exh. cat., Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2007, pp. 72, 81-2).
“I have been interested in time-based work for a long time and photography is a very compelling medium to comment on ideas of selfhood,” Campos-Pons has reflected. “I was interested in a dialogue between the performance and the creation of the image. Polaroid was the perfect tool in which I could elaborate on the immediacy of the process, which offers great opportunities for improvisation as well as play, with a very rich, saturated palette and a glamorous surface” (in L. Bell, “History of People Who Were Not Heroes: A Conversation with María Magdalena Campos-Pons,” Third Text 12, no. 43, 1998, p. 42). Campos-Pons gained access to one of Polaroid’s ultra-large-format cameras at MassArt in 1994 and began to produce the 20-by-24-inch prints that constitute her already iconic series of photographic compositions, among them Elevata (2002; Indianapolis Museum of Art), Constellation (2004; Smithsonian American Art Museum), Blue Refuge (2008; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum), and the present Bin Bin Lady: Dakar Swatch.
Campos-Pons appears at the center of Bin Bin Lady: Dakar Swatch, framed on each side by long-stemmed white gladiolus, their blooms sharply illuminated against the black ground. She faces away from the viewer, revealing a diaphanous white dress and head wrap that recall the all-white clothing worn by initiates into Santería. The work harks back to The Calling (2003), a diptych in which the artist appears identically clad but in profile, leaning backward with the flowers held above her head; it shares its name with Bin Bin Lady: The Harvest (2005) and Bin Bin Lady: La Papaya (2007; Williams College Museum of Art), which incorporate fruit and head coverings within their composite self-portraits. “I am very interested in the meaning of fragmentation because in my reading, exile is an expression of fragmentation, and at the same time, it is a construction of the whole,” Campos-Pons explains, with respect to her Polaroid pieces. “I believe that it is something that comes from very deep inside me about telling a story that has many parts, that comes from many sources of origin, and trying to join it into one to create a totality. There is the idea of the body, both to reclaim the power and to reclaim the kind of pride, and the kind of space that this body should occupy: a black woman in the center as such. Yes, I have done a lot of things to comment on the idea of beauty” (in W. Luis, “Art and Diaspora,” op. cit., p. 165).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“Campos-Pons is heir to the fraught history of the Middle Passage,” observes critic Okwui Enwezor, noting her descent from the Yoruba people of Nigeria through her great-grandparents, who were brought to Cuba in the mid-1800s. “She has submitted the weight of its historical and theoretical possibilities to some of the most trenchant, poetic, and radically introspective artistic reflection on the displaced agency of Africans in the Americas.” Enwezor locates a “diasporic imagination” in the “series of performance-oriented Polaroid photographs,” including Bin Bin Lady: Dakar Swatch, that “directly referenc[e] the iconography of Yoruba and Afro-Cuban imagery.” Drawing upon the “meaning and power of transculturation,” he continues, “she deployed self-portraiture as a dialectical form of self-ethnography, incisively using her body as a site of mapping and reading difference and identity” (“The Diasporic Imagination: The Memory Works of María Magdalena Campos-Pons,” María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Everything is Separated by Water, exh. cat., Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2007, pp. 72, 81-2).
“I have been interested in time-based work for a long time and photography is a very compelling medium to comment on ideas of selfhood,” Campos-Pons has reflected. “I was interested in a dialogue between the performance and the creation of the image. Polaroid was the perfect tool in which I could elaborate on the immediacy of the process, which offers great opportunities for improvisation as well as play, with a very rich, saturated palette and a glamorous surface” (in L. Bell, “History of People Who Were Not Heroes: A Conversation with María Magdalena Campos-Pons,” Third Text 12, no. 43, 1998, p. 42). Campos-Pons gained access to one of Polaroid’s ultra-large-format cameras at MassArt in 1994 and began to produce the 20-by-24-inch prints that constitute her already iconic series of photographic compositions, among them Elevata (2002; Indianapolis Museum of Art), Constellation (2004; Smithsonian American Art Museum), Blue Refuge (2008; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum), and the present Bin Bin Lady: Dakar Swatch.
Campos-Pons appears at the center of Bin Bin Lady: Dakar Swatch, framed on each side by long-stemmed white gladiolus, their blooms sharply illuminated against the black ground. She faces away from the viewer, revealing a diaphanous white dress and head wrap that recall the all-white clothing worn by initiates into Santería. The work harks back to The Calling (2003), a diptych in which the artist appears identically clad but in profile, leaning backward with the flowers held above her head; it shares its name with Bin Bin Lady: The Harvest (2005) and Bin Bin Lady: La Papaya (2007; Williams College Museum of Art), which incorporate fruit and head coverings within their composite self-portraits. “I am very interested in the meaning of fragmentation because in my reading, exile is an expression of fragmentation, and at the same time, it is a construction of the whole,” Campos-Pons explains, with respect to her Polaroid pieces. “I believe that it is something that comes from very deep inside me about telling a story that has many parts, that comes from many sources of origin, and trying to join it into one to create a totality. There is the idea of the body, both to reclaim the power and to reclaim the kind of pride, and the kind of space that this body should occupy: a black woman in the center as such. Yes, I have done a lot of things to comment on the idea of beauty” (in W. Luis, “Art and Diaspora,” op. cit., p. 165).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park