The multidisciplinary Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons has found in her personal and family history her best artistic resource. Through her work, Campos-Pons makes viewers bear witness to the survival of a culture, a religion, and a people marked by slavery and colonialism. Her art knows no limits, as she's capable of drawing paintings, making sculptures, taking photos, performing, and more, resulting in immersive art installations.
Born in 1959, Campos-Pons graduated from the National School of Art in Havana in 1980 and continued her studies at the Higher Institute of Art of Havana. She continued her studies in the following year, attending the MFA program at the Massachusetts College of Art in 1988 and receiving the Bunting Fellowship in Visual Arts at Harvard University in 1993.
She grew up in La Vega, a community near Matanzas that was home to a large group of descendants of enslaved Africans. Campos-Pons' great-grandmother was an enslaved Nigerian, so she knows firsthand the challenges that her people faced when trying to keep their spiritual beliefs and traditions alive.
"I explore transcultural and transgenerational themes, focusing on race and gender, which are expressed through symbols of matriarchy and motherhood. These themes arise from my deep connection to my family and cultural history."
The symbolism of Yoruba-based Santería is one of the main resources that Campos-Pons uses to address the past and present challenges of the culture she inherited. As the granddaughter of a priestess and the daughter of a father who practiced herbalism, Campos-Pons has focused her work on the sacred connection between spirit and body, a fundamental aspect of Santería.
However, Campos-Pons' work isn't only shaped by slavery and colonialism; it's also marked by something that she went through herself: exile. Due to the increasingly tense political climate in Cuba, the artist moved to the United States in 1991, and it took her many years before she could return to the island. In this way, the artist pays homage to her ancestors' forced labor and the sacrifice behind migration.
"She forges connections between her own experiences as a Cuban woman and global issues of displacement and inequality."
Campos-Pons was recognized with a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2023 and, in December 2024, received the ARTnews Lifetime Achievement Award. Also in 2023, the Brooklyn Museum in New York presented an exhibition covering nearly four decades of her career, including a series of multimedia works shown for the first time in the United States.
In 2025, the J. Paul Getty Museum presented the María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold exhibition in collaboration with the Brooklyn Museum, with the show exploring stories of global slavery, forced labor, migration, and motherhood through the Cuban artist's personal and family narrative.