María Magdalena Campos-Pons
Finding Balance
February 23—April 29, 2023
436 Jackson Street, San Francisco, CA
San Francisco, CA: Afro-Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons addresses issues of history, memory, gender and religion through her work; she investigates how each one of these themes informs identity. Campos-Pons employs painting, installation, performance, video and photography to create autobiographical works that invite close examination and consideration.
Marking the 20th Anniversary of Gallery Wendi Norris and inaugurating their new headquarters at 436 Jackson Street, Finding Balance is the second solo presentation for Campos-Pons with the gallery. The exhibition borrows its name from Campos-Pons's monumental 28-panel multimedia masterwork, which is the centerpiece of the show. The exhibition will focus on Campos-Pons's large-format polaroid works, including a complementary array of multi-paneled works that have never been shown by the gallery.
The past year has witnessed a surge of interest and excitement around Campos-Pons, demonstrated by recent acquisitions of her work by The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Princeton University Art Museum; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Speed Art Museum, Louisville; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and other public and private collectors.
In fall of 2023, Campos-Pons will have a major touring multi-media survey, co-organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum entitled María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold. The first survey show of her work since 2007, Behold will travel to four North American locations with a catalog published by the Getty. Campos-Pons also will participate in the Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present, in the United Arab Emirates, February 7-June 11, 2023.
In the catalog accompanying the first full-scale survey of Campos-Pons’ work, Everything Is Separated By Water, co-organized in 2007 by the Bass Museum of Art and the Indianapolis Art Museum, curator and scholar Okwui Enwezor situates the artist within his extensive study of African diasporic communities, stating that “Campos-Pons is heir to the fraught history of the Middle Passage; she has submitted the weight of its historical and theoretical possibilities to some of the most trenchant, poetic, and radically introspective artistic reflection on the displaced agency of Africans in the Americas.” Enwezor further observes that “for Campos-Pons, identification with the Afro-Cuban heritage of Cuba, specifically the cultural logic of Yoruba tradition to which she traces her ancestry, is a crucial aspect of her artistic conception of mixed tradition.”
The 28-panel work Finding Balance is part of a series entitled FeFa that Campos-Pons began in 2017 and installed in both the Havana and Venice Biennales the following year. The series examines the intersection of Campos-Pons’s African, Caribbean, and Chinese heritage within the context of slavery and the sugar trade.
In a 2018 essay about FeFa for Harvard Review, Alexandra Chang, Curator of Special Projects and Director of Global Arts Programs at A/P/A Institute at New York University, says of Campos-Pons, “her work offers a space for Caribbean identities outside of the more dominant narratives of ‘black and white.’ Her large-scale Polaroid installations triangulate the histories of the slave trade and Chinese coolies in the Caribbean working in the sugar industry, as well as early political meetings and merchant crossings in relation to China, Africa and Europe.”
Finding Balance is an extraordinary example of this exploration of multifarious identity and cultural flux. The work is part performance, part painting, and part photography, melding the three media into a mysterious whole. Campos-Pons herself is the central character, dominating the panels in a pose based on Chinese ancestor portraits. She wears a birdcage hat bisected by fabric-wrapped weaponry dripping with prayer beads, redolent of Yoruba headdresses yet referencing slavery, religious devotion and violence. Her dragon-blazoned Chinese Imperial costume further demonstrates the complexity of her identity, along with multi-colored fabric knots from Yoruba ceremony placed within elaborate Chinese cabinetry.
Additional works in the exhibition reinforce the power of Finding Balance, providing further evidence that Campos-Pons has taken her place amongst the most important artists working today. Finding Balance will be on view at Gallery Wendi Norris, 436 Jackson Street, San Francisco from February 23 - April 29, 2023.