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Lot Essay
“Who is the other? What is center? What is periphery?” asks Campos-Pons. “My work really tries to contest and to contextualize the discourse of what it means to be a Cuban woman who happens to be black, happens to be born in that particular period of time in this large platform of ideas” (in W. Luis, “Art and Diaspora: A Conversation with María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Afro-Hispanic Review 30, no. 2, Fall 2011, p. 156). Born of African, Cuban, and Chinese heritage on a sugar plantation in Matanzas, Campos-Pons graduated from Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte in 1985 and earned an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art in 1988. Since immigrating to the United States in 1991, she has evolved a diverse, multimedia practice informed by Afro-Cuban history and religion; race, ethnicity, and gender; and memory and migration. Campos-Pons has exhibited at major international venues—Havana Biennial, Documenta, Venice Biennale—and held solo exhibitions at the Peabody Essex Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and Casa de las Américas.
Campos-Pons created Soy una fuente during a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta. A heart-shaped, mixed-media installation, the work comprises six sculptural reliefs painted with oil and acrylic on Masonite that describe female bodily functions: milk-spewing breasts, watering eye, salivating tongue, bleeding vagina, birthing belly, defecating bowels. Like the installation Everything is Separated by Water, Including My Brain, My Heart, My Sex, My House (1990) and the series When I Am Not Here / Estoy Allá (1994), Soy una fuente probes female sexuality and embodiment, celebrated here as a site of empowerment. “I was reclaiming woman not just as body,” Campos-Pons has explained in reference to the tongue, “but as intellectual entity and generator of knowledge” (in T. Flores, “Sea and Self,” María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Sea and Self, exh. cat., Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, 2021, p. 10).
Soy una fuente renders the body in pieces, and its fragmentation gestures to the liminality of exile, identity, and even language in its bilingual text. “I am very interested in the meaning of fragmentation because in my reading, exile is an expression of fragmentation, and at the same time, it is a construction of the whole,” Campos-Pons allows. “Separation is an expression of fragmentation. Identity is the overall view of fragmentation and the construction of one thing in all of our experience.” A feminist narrative ultimately emerges through the reclamation of these sundry pieces: “I believe that it is something that comes from very deep inside me about telling a story that has many parts, that comes from many sources of origin, and trying to join it into one to create a totality,” Campos-Pons reflects. “There is the idea of the body, both to reclaim the power and to reclaim the kind of pride, and the kind of space that this body should occupy: a black woman in the center as such. Yes, I have done a lot of things to comment on the idea of beauty” (in W. Luis, op. cit., p.165).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Campos-Pons created Soy una fuente during a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta. A heart-shaped, mixed-media installation, the work comprises six sculptural reliefs painted with oil and acrylic on Masonite that describe female bodily functions: milk-spewing breasts, watering eye, salivating tongue, bleeding vagina, birthing belly, defecating bowels. Like the installation Everything is Separated by Water, Including My Brain, My Heart, My Sex, My House (1990) and the series When I Am Not Here / Estoy Allá (1994), Soy una fuente probes female sexuality and embodiment, celebrated here as a site of empowerment. “I was reclaiming woman not just as body,” Campos-Pons has explained in reference to the tongue, “but as intellectual entity and generator of knowledge” (in T. Flores, “Sea and Self,” María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Sea and Self, exh. cat., Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, 2021, p. 10).
Soy una fuente renders the body in pieces, and its fragmentation gestures to the liminality of exile, identity, and even language in its bilingual text. “I am very interested in the meaning of fragmentation because in my reading, exile is an expression of fragmentation, and at the same time, it is a construction of the whole,” Campos-Pons allows. “Separation is an expression of fragmentation. Identity is the overall view of fragmentation and the construction of one thing in all of our experience.” A feminist narrative ultimately emerges through the reclamation of these sundry pieces: “I believe that it is something that comes from very deep inside me about telling a story that has many parts, that comes from many sources of origin, and trying to join it into one to create a totality,” Campos-Pons reflects. “There is the idea of the body, both to reclaim the power and to reclaim the kind of pride, and the kind of space that this body should occupy: a black woman in the center as such. Yes, I have done a lot of things to comment on the idea of beauty” (in W. Luis, op. cit., p.165).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park