MIAMI BEACH, FL - (July 27, 2007) - The work of critically acclaimed Afro-Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons premieres at the Bass Museum September 21, 2007. This exhibition features 17 major works, including mixed media installations and large-format Polaroid photographs. The body of work spans 15 years (1990-2005), and explores Campos-Pons’s ancestral displacement from Africa, her self-imposed exile from Cuba, and her experience as an Afro-Cuban woman living in North America. On view through November 11, 2007, this exhibition will be the first in-depth view of her artistic career, and will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue, the first to explore Compos-Pons’s work.

Campos-Pons is often hailed as one of the most important contemporary Cuban artists working today and her work has been exhibited internationally including at the Venice Biennale, the Johannesburg Biennial, the Havana Biennial, the Dak’ART Biennial in Senegal and the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial in Japan. Throughout her career, Campos-Pons has remained singularly focused on transforming the ordinary materials, rituals, and traditions of life into powerful visual and sensory experiences.

The art of Campos-Pons offers penetrating insight into how we are shaped by our environment. Mixing media in unexpected ways, Campos-Pons often incorporates handmade elements into slick new media projects or photographs that document private performances of her adorned, costumed body. Each of the ideas that she investigates dictates the formal approach and specific media used. When the artist uses her personal experiences as the basis for her projects, she does so with the intent of speaking about larger cultural and historical phenomena.

“The exhibition explores the aesthetic routes this artist has taken to trace literal and imagined diasporic roots—from Africa to Cuba to the United States,” said Lisa D. Freiman, the IMA’s curator of contemporary art. “Campos-Pons’s diverse works condense the fragmented characteristics of memory into provocative and poignant formal statements about cultural survival and transformation.”

The title of the exhibition was inspired by a mixed-media work that Campos-Pons created in 1990, Everything Is Separated by Water, Including My Brain, My Heart, My Sex, My House. In the work, a column of water divides the image of a female body and barbed wire encases each half of the figure. The feet stand on renderings of small Aztec temples, suggesting a tie to the history of ritual sacrifice in the Americas. The metaphoric work is representative of numerous issues that have preoccupied Campos-Pons during the past 20 years—exile, personal and national identity, cultural hybridity and socio-economic politics—and provides a strong framework for understanding her aesthetic production.

Background Information

Born in Mantanzas, Cuba, in 1959, María Magdalena Campos-Pons grew up in La Vega, a small sugar plantation town. She was raised among the first generation of Cuban children educated after the Cuban Revolution and benefited from Cuba’s newly formed art education system. At age 13, Campos-Pons began her art education at the National School of Art, where she studied from 1976 to 1979. Between 1980 and 1985, she attended the Graduate Institute of Art (ISA) in Havana, where she joined Cuba’s most talented emerging artists who were creating contemporary work in dialogue with the global art world.

Campos-Pons gained international recognition in the late 1980s with a series of painted abstract reliefs dealing with female sexuality. During this period, described by one scholar as the “Cuban Renaissance,” artists were increasingly using art as a form of social criticism and showing their work in important international exhibitions. Campos-Pons participated in many of these shows in Germany, Australia, Great Britain and the United States. In 1990, she left Cuba to participate in a fellowship in Banff, Canada, and in 1991 moved to Boston where she currently resides.

Since then, her work--which increasingly has taken the form of mixed media installation and large-scale photography--is a dynamic model of inventive diasporic identity that hinges on re-assembling lost fragments, symbols and memories of personal and collective history, religion and mythology. Many of her paintings, installations and photographs deploy the artist’s body in its entirety or fragmented into parts, creating a formal language that addresses the challenges inherent in building a coherent identity in the modern world.

Campos-Pons states “I am interested in rituals and traditions, how to place them into the contemporary setting. African tradition is my everyday life experience. I don’t have to search for my roots. . . I believe it’s possible to live in America and at the same time, in Cuba spiritually and mentally.” The artist’s work testifies to the fact that identity is contradictory, flexible and mobile.

Exhibition Organization and Support

The exhibition is organized by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The exhibition is curated by Lisa D. Freiman, curator of contemporary art at the IMA, who is the author of the only full-length scholarly study of Campos-Pons’s work that will be available in the Bass Museum shop.

The exhibition catalogue is published by the Indianapolis Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press. With essays by Freiman and Okwui Enwezor, Dean of Academic Affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute and past Artistic Director of Documenta XI, Kassel, Germany, 2002, the catalogue will trace the formal and conceptual transformation of Campos-Pons’ work in relation to contemporary aesthetic practices, and will serve as a resource for specialists in the field of contemporary, African Diasporic, Caribbean, and African American art and culture.

Everything Is Separated by Water: María Magdalena Campos-Pons is supported in part by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and in part through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts - Access to Artistic Excellence category. The National Endowment for the Arts is a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education. The exhibition catalogue is made possible in part through a grant from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation.