“You know, Mom, I’ve been crying all these years for being away,” Campos-Pons told her mother when she visited here during the summer of 2005. But her mother saw her achievements. She said, “You know it was all for your own good.”
Like Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems, with whom she’s often compared, Campos-Pons has fallen out of the art world’s hot focus over the past decade. The Indianapolis retrospective was organized by Lisa Freiman, who was a curatorial assistant at the ICA when she discovered Campos-Pons, and it affirms this artist’s continuing importance. Bogdanov elaborates, “Her work orients me in the time and space we live in, because today’s world is the world of exiles, of dispersement, of relocation.”
Tacked to a wall of Campos-Pons’s studio is the beginning of a large realist painting of an illegal Senegalese immigrant whom she saw selling knockoff Gucci purses on the street while she was living near Venice during a residency Leonard had there last year. It’s the seed of a new body of work that addresses her signature themes of racial identity, the legacy of white colonialism, the African diaspora but now identifies them in the lives of others. “I am always afraid of repeating myself. Consistency, I have no interest in that. My consistency is always moving on to the next thing.”
“María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Everything is Separated by Water” | Indianapolis Museum of Art | February 25–June 3
On the Web
Inianapolis Museum of Art: www.ima-art.org
Related:
Skin deep, Re-creational vehicle, What was, and what might have been, More 
- Skin deep
The facial and body tattoos of New Zealand’s indigenous Maori people were originally chiseled into the skin by means of an albatross bone and vegetable-based pigments.
- Re-creational vehicle
Gallery exhibitions organized by high-profile outside curators have become an art-season staple.
- What was, and what might have been
Sara and Gerald Murphy are back, and in the words of their friend Cole Porter, “What a swell party it is.”
- Eye on you
Oskar Kokoschka is reputed to have asked, if the Louvre were burning and you could rescue either the Mona Lisa or a cat, which would it be? Slideshow: "Super Vision" at the ICA
- Kickstart art
The straightforwardly named Boston Contemporary Group aims “to support an environment in Boston for critically relevant contemporary art.”
- Smoke and mirrors (and elephants) at the ICA
Not into wheatpasting and framed posters? The ICA is about to serve up two shows by artists who promise not to pop up on street walls all over the city.
- More than a feeling
The centerpiece of the Museum of Fine Arts' "Contemporary Outlook: Seeing Songs" is Candice Breitz's 2005 Queen (A Portrait of Madonna), a wall of 30 televisions, each showing a different Madonna fan singing a cappella to her 1990 greatest-hits compilation, The Immaculate Collection. They wear headphones, bob their heads, sing aloud to music we can't hear.
- Every Friday there's an art walk
This Friday, as the first Friday of every month, Portland art-lovers will wander the streets, checking out the latest and greatest our galleries, museums, and shops have to offer. Nearby communities have their own versions, too.
- Water world
What's the difference between art photography and fashion photography? That's the question I kept wondering about at Joni Sternbach's "SurfLand" exhibition at Salem's Peabody Essex Museum.
- End-of-year exhibitions reveal mystery and beauty
Think it’s impossible to find a newish gallery show at the end of December? Think again.
- Dreaming of celluloid
Of the handful of contemporary Asian shows on view in and around Boston this winter, that of Dinh Q. Lê should prove unique — if only because the Vietnamese condition is so far removed from the rest of East Asia’s cultural boom.
- Less
Topics:
Museum And Gallery
, Painting, Visual Arts, Cultural Institutions and Parks, More
, Painting, Visual Arts, Cultural Institutions and Parks, Museums, The Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Institution, Walker Art Center, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Neil Leonard, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Less
