Between Black and Blue: María Magdalena Campos-Pons at the Haggerty

×

Expand

Photo Courtesy Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University

Between Black and Blue: María Magdalena Campos-Pons at the Haggerty

María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s current show at the Haggerty Museum of Art walks a fine line between abstraction and figuration, Black and blue, and belonging and separation. Born in Cuba, Campos-Pons was trained across the 1970s and ‘80s under the island’s robust arts education system. Her early work explored themes of women’s eroticism, and she became loosely affiliated with “New Cuban Art,” a group of artists born around the revolution, active in the 1980s, and defined by an uncharacteristic frankness (and often dissent) in a culturally repressive state.

At the same time that decolonial women of color were honing a critical vocabulary to discuss the relationship among gender, race, nationality and other vectors of identity—what has today coalesced around intersectionality—Campos-Pons was making an analogous move. In addition to themes of gender and sexuality in her earlier work, she increasingly explored her own Nigerian, Hisipanic and Chinese roots. The body, often her own, appears in relation to explicit references to Afro-diasporic spirituality, even as practices like Santería were officially banned in revolutionary Cuba.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the Nigerian-born, England-based photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode was making similar connections. Campos-Pons was thus at the forefront of a generation of artists who used their work to navigate the afterlife of slavery, geopolitical dislocation, and cultural rupture, ultimately forging what Okwui Enwezor called a diasporic imagination.

Dislocation, Uprootedness

These themes were further resolved in the later ‘80s when Campos-Pons spent time studying as a visiting artist in Canada and the U.S. before eventually settling in Boston in 1991 as Cuba’s economy was reeling. She expanded her media repertoire to include performance and video and began to use Spanish and English in her work. Her time away from Cuba sharpened themes of dislocation and uprootedness, and her show at the Haggerty, curated by Tatiana Flores, explores these themes through the prism of the sea in photography from the mid-‘90s onward and recent drawings.

Campos-Pons’ photographic works are elaborate staged, multi-media affairs that combine installation, performance, painting, and sculpture, often through groupings and grids of large-format Polaroids. As a poetics of rupture, her use of multiple panels severs and cleaves an ostensibly unified visual field. In Nesting IV (2000), the artist’s downturned head is doubly bisected, both by a panel of oceanic blue as well as the frame’s interregnum. This literal fragmentation becomes a spatial metaphor for being and belonging between and across multiple diasporas. Even as this separation throws the image’s continuity out of joint, however, Campos-Pons is careful to insinuate lines of continuity. In almost every work here, there are shared horizons to be found in repeating patterns, threads of hair, and lines of blue that insist on continuity amidst all the rupture.

The second half of the show comprises two suites of more recent drawings that continue to trade in an economy of abstraction and figuration. The roughly chronological sequencing is particularly effective here. With the earlier photographs having established the exhibition’s key themes, the recent drawings are able to pursue a less literal language while remaining thematically coherent. The drawings broadly explore the sea as a source for cosmology and negative universal history. At the same time, their restrained color palette slips between blacks and blues, implicitly forwarding the inextricability of Blackness and the sea.

The show closes with an excerpt from a collaborative 2020 video titled When We Gather, which continues to explore themes of dislocation amidst references to Afro-diasporic religion. The piece features a LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs poem inspired by Kamala Harris’s election as vice president. Though Harris has indeed broken new ground as the first woman-of-color to hold the office, it is also worth remembering José Muñoz critique that “such modes of integration can too easily be celebrated as a disordering of institutions of power when that is simply not the case.” In June, amidst a surge of migrants at the U.S. southern border, Harris addressed Guatemalans, telling them flatly “Do not come.” That this context inflicts, even minimally, a work by an artist who has dedicated so much loving thought to the complexities of global migration sounds a sour note in an otherwise stellar exhibit. A reminder of the many separations that remain.