One day Campos-Pons came home shaken from had happened at her job with the Cuban visual-arts council. Officials wanted to shut down a gallery exhibit because they suspected that the paintings of Castro were vaguely, ambiguously critical. Campos-Pons convinced them that the exhibit wasn’t a threat and that censoring it would only turn the artists into martyrs. The next day the minister of the Interior called and told her to shut it down anyway. “Didn’t we agree to keep it open yesterday?” she said. “Yes. Shut it down,” he replied. “Is this an order?” she asked. “Yes,” he said. “I’m not in the military,” she snapped and hung up. The result: the show was closed and her boss was fired.
“I love Cuba,” Campos-Pons says. “I am very passionate about the possibilities there. There is a need for change in Cuba, and I want to be part of that change. But at that moment I knew it was a place where it would be very difficult to be there and keep yourself in a position where you are honest, where you are straight.”
She spent a year and a half in Canada on arts fellowships, with Leonard visiting from Boston on weekends, before the US allowed her to immigrate to Boston, at the end of 1991. The process left them exhausted and alienated, and angry.
WHEN I AM NOT HERE/ESTOY ALLÁ (1994): The Indianapolis retrospective reaffirms Campos-Pons’s importance and influence. |
At the ICA in 1992, Campos-Pons presented The Seven Powers Come by the Sea, an installation featuring wood planks carved to resemble slave ships packed with people, painted silhouettes of the African deities of Cuban slaves, and photos of residents of her home town. Multiculturalism and art of personal identity were all the rage as the art world sought voices outside the white male mainstream. “Magdalena was the most current, edgy manifestation of pushing the media and dealing with these issues,” says Olga Viso, now director of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, who in 1994 included her in an Afro-Cuban art-museum exhibit in Florida.Campos-Pons began to shoot large, lush Polaroid photographs, usually self-portraits in which she performed ritualistic acts, painting her body, dipping her fingers into small wooden boats filled with honey, braiding and beading her hair. A 1994 photo of her naked torso, painted with blue waves, speaks of exile as well as the birth of her son Arcadio in 1993. A pair of baby bottles hang over her shoulders and drip milk into wooden boat she cradles in her hands. Since 2002, she’s produced ever more ambitious Polaroids, including ravishing 16-photo grids, with props and painted backdrops, in which braided hair “grows” from her head in long doodly vines, tumbleweeds, and constellations.
She and her family bounced around Jamaica Plain before settling in Brookline in 2002. She fashioned a studio building for herself and others on Boylston Street and opened Gasp there as well in 2004. Gasp specializes in group shows of young experimenting artists and stars from the international art circuit that her own stature attracts. It’s one of a handful of galleries in town that aren’t primarily commercial or institutional.
