GrantOctober 15, 2023
Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons Winner of the MacArthur Fellowship
The MacArthur Fellowship program aims to encourage professionals in different areas; creative, intellectual, among others. In this sense, the candidates can be: writers, scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, humanists, professors, among others. The scholarship consists of financial support to improve their knowledge, undertake new projects and even modify their professional careers. The program does not consist of rewarding a career, but investing in the originality and potential of a person over 5 years.
On October 4, it was announced that María Magdalena Campos-Pons won one of the places in the MacArthur Fellowship 2023. Campos-Pons is a multidisciplinary artist who explores memory, spirituality and identity through her history and the collective histories of the Caribbean. Her work establishes connections between her own experiences as a Cuban woman and the global issues of both displacement and inequality. Campos-Pons' artistic practice includes photography, performance, sculpture, drawing, painting and video.
For example, in The Seven Powers Came by the Sea (1992) the artist inscribed seven wooden planks in the shape of a ship's hull with stick figures representing the bodies of enslaved Africans and wrote the name of a Yoruba religious deity. The invocation of the deities, on the one hand, consecrates the piece and, on the other, refers to rituals lost in the transatlantic slave trade. In works such as Replenishing (2023), Campos-Pons created an installation of fragmented photographs of her and her mother. The division of their bodies into three, breaks the lineal narrative, but each one holds a string of colored beads, which appears in a photograph between them, referring to the connection between the frontiers of time and space.
Beyond her artistic practice, the artist establishes platforms for other artists to exhibit their work. She is the founder and director of Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice, an organization that proposes institutional connections and artists from the Global South.
On October 4, it was announced that María Magdalena Campos-Pons won one of the places in the MacArthur Fellowship 2023. Campos-Pons is a multidisciplinary artist who explores memory, spirituality and identity through her history and the collective histories of the Caribbean. Her work establishes connections between her own experiences as a Cuban woman and the global issues of both displacement and inequality. Campos-Pons' artistic practice includes photography, performance, sculpture, drawing, painting and video.
For example, in The Seven Powers Came by the Sea (1992) the artist inscribed seven wooden planks in the shape of a ship's hull with stick figures representing the bodies of enslaved Africans and wrote the name of a Yoruba religious deity. The invocation of the deities, on the one hand, consecrates the piece and, on the other, refers to rituals lost in the transatlantic slave trade. In works such as Replenishing (2023), Campos-Pons created an installation of fragmented photographs of her and her mother. The division of their bodies into three, breaks the lineal narrative, but each one holds a string of colored beads, which appears in a photograph between them, referring to the connection between the frontiers of time and space.
Beyond her artistic practice, the artist establishes platforms for other artists to exhibit their work. She is the founder and director of Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice, an organization that proposes institutional connections and artists from the Global South.
