Fall Guide 2024: María Magdalena Campos-Pons Talks ‘Behold’

When you talk with María Magdalena Campos-Pons, it’s easy to get carried away. On a recent Tuesday afternoon at her studio on the Vanderbilt University campus, the artist padded across a makeshift flat file — layers of works-on-paper she covered with cardboard and yoga mats on the floor — in slippers she picked up from a recent stay at an Italian hotel. She beams with what seems like a real sense of wonder, holding a staff made from dried sunflowers affixed to a stick with black gaffer tape.

“I’m realizing that I’ve got an American Gothic look here,” she jokes before placing the staff carefully back in its place among various handmade paint brushes. Campos-Pons explains that the staff is actually a kind of broom she recently made for a performance, something like a sweeping ritual, and then speaks of how powerful the act of cleaning a space can be.

“I’m interested in the idea of labor as a beautifying process,” she says, explaining that this was the way she grew up, raised by workers at a former sugar plantation in Cuba. “That’s my personal history — how much beauty was surrounding me in places of scarcity.”

It’s hard to make small talk when approached with such direct tenderness.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons — Magda to her friends — is the subject of what might be the most important exhibition of work by a Nashville-based artist in recent history. Behold, which opens at the Frist Art Museum on Sept. 27, spans nearly 40 years of the artist’s work and includes photos, multimedia installations, video art, painting and performance. It’s her first multimedia museum survey since 2007, but more importantly — for Nashville at least — it’s the first career-spanning survey of the artist’s work since she became a Nashville resident in 2017.

Among the most magnificent pieces in the show are recent works that Campos-Pons made in the seven years she’s lived here. But to fully appreciate the stories those works tell, you must first get familiar with her artistic lineage. 

In many ways, Campos-Pons’ installation Spoken Softly With Mama is the artist’s masterpiece, and it returns to Nashville after a 2011 exhibition that was also at the Frist. But a more straightforward starting point into the artist’s world is a 24-by-20-inch Polaroid Polacolor Pro photograph from 1999. Like Spoken Softly, the ultra-large Polaroid was made in the late 1990s, about a decade after she first arrived in the U.S. Both works also foreshadow ideas that Campos-Pons would return to throughout her career.

The Polaroid is called “The Right Protection,” and it shows the artist from the back — from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine. Her bare skin is covered in dozens of drawn-on eyes. She explains that in this piece, she was investigating sight. Or rather, “seeing beyond the sight of the eyes — sensorial seeing, perceptual and seeing with the body itself.” 

A companion piece — also from 1999, also called “The Right Protection” — further explores Campos-Pons’ practice as a curious instigator. It is a lithograph of the Polaroid, but instead of painting the eyes onto the paper’s surface, the artist made the paper itself, painting the pulp directly into the paper. That way, the artist explains, the “eyes are merging as the paper is being dried,” she says. “I painted it with colored pulp, in a way.”

The lithograph, which is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, shows one of Campos-Pons’ greatest strengths. She is able to translate ideas in different mediums and through different methods — in this case both photography and printmaking. 

The eyes return in pieces that the artist made while living in Nashville, and if you look closely you’ll find eyes emphasized or drawn into many of Campos-Pons’ works. The 2020 ink-and-watercolor painting “Miasma #7” was made during the long days of the early pandemic when Campos-Pons was working from home, set up at her kitchen table. The pieces from this time period reflect the stunted way we all processed the world — instead of her body, it looks more like a global map, a battleground, an oil spill, a broken mirror. 

In an attempt to include examples from all of Campos-Pons’ expansive output, Behold is divided into sections based on theme rather than chronology and medium. Each section works like its own mini exhibition — “History of a People Who Were Not Heroes” features three powerful installations, including Spoken Softly With Mama, and “Process and Performance” addresses the artist’s continuing use of her own presence as a conduit for ideas. The show opened in September 2023 at the Brooklyn Museum — less than a month before the artist received a prestigious MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship — and will travel to the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center in L.A. after it leaves Nashville.

There’s one series in particular that will perhaps resonate with her Nashville audiences more than their New York or Los Angeles counterparts. Secrets of the Magnolia Tree is Campos-Pons’ series of massive mixed-media works that monumentalize the artist and her friends as anthropomorphized owls. These 132-by-90-inch multipanel works read like photographs that have been painted on top and alongside of, but of course there is much more to them than that. The titular magnolia tree is a relatively new item that Campos-Pons has begun to incorporate into her work. It began when she moved to Nashville to work as the Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Art at Vanderbilt University. The university grounds are located on an arboretum, to which she attributes this recurring symbol of the magnolia — a symbol that seems to haunt her recent work.

“What I saw was not only the beauty of the nature here,” she explains, “but walking in Vanderbilt’s arboretum — and having the privilege to explore and be in the company of the magnolia — was for me a way to think about the complex history of the South. I am an Afro-Cuban woman, a melanated person, and the relationship between Black people in the South and the landscape is a complex one. So to reconcile my celebration of the beauty of the tree — which I do, I cannot help it — I need to … engage myself in the reverie of this location.”

To imagine herself as an owl is a way to appreciate the Southern landscape — and especially its trees — with the necessary detachment from the horror of its history. Once you’ve detached from that, Campos-Pons explains, you cannot help but revel in the beauty of the world. As she speaks of the owl, she continues to work in her studio. She never seems to stop working, and she speaks in what seem like carefully parsed fragments of off-the-cuff poetry: “It was a complex history, but — however, however, however — look at what has come out of it. How much beauty!”

She picks up a small brush and dabs at a bit of white paint. At the moment, she’s painting on a large-scale photo of a cracked cement wall that she took on a recent visit to her hometown of Matanzas, Cuba. She’s attentively tracing lines around the cracks in the gray cement, working slowly and deliberately in a kind of Japanese wabi-sabi. She is working to emphasize the crack, and in the process she will beautify its presence instead of erasing it.

The exhibition title is fitting for an artist like Campos-Pons, who takes the smallest things — like looking, seeing and being seen — and turns them into universally relevant points of interest simply through her careful appreciation. “What is it to behold?” I ask her. What is it about witnessing that is so important?

“We are voyeurs of our times,” she says simply, not looking up from her painting. “Everyone is a participant in the narration of time.”

“No one is excluded."

Fall Guide 2024

María Magdalena Campos-Pons’ 'Behold' tops our list of the season’s most exciting art, music, book, theater, dance and film events