María Magdalena Campos-Pons
María Magdalena Campos-Pons is a Cuban American artist that uses installation, video, photography, painting, sculpture, and performance to examine notions of identity. Campos-Pons’ work is cross-cultural and cross-generational, and it is layered and complex. It is personal but refers directly to universal themes of memory, history, religion, gender, and race. Campos-Pons aims to tell stories that have been forgotten, and of people that have been ignored.
Campos-Pons has had solo exhibitions at several distinguished institutions, and her works are in over 30 museum collections. She was an artist-curator at the 13th Havana Art Biennial and took part in the Venice Biennale, the Dakar Biennale, Documenta 14 among others. She is currently represented by Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco, CA.
About her work in WOV II:
“An Army of Angels” (2019) is a watercolor on paper from the series “Un Pedazo de Mar” (“A piece of the sea”). A group of angels floats in a flood of hues of blues. The intensity and movement portrayed in the work reflect the same characteristics present in a turbulent sea. As a crucial aspect of the Middle Passage and Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the ocean has been referred to by Campos-Pons in previous works, such as “The Seven Powers came by the Sea” (1992).
The title “An Army of Angels” might refer to the ancestors that died at sea during the 300 years of the Atlantic Slave trade and still serve as protectors.