The Women's Work Issue Women's Work. Pen and Brush. 2019 | Page 26

pen + brush x of note
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Entangled Genealogies of Women’s Work
By Tao Leigh Goffe
Cuban-born artist María Magdalena Campos-
Pons’s oeuvre spans form and media, from
sculpture, to photography, to painting, to video, to
audio, to collage, to performance. Her work has
been featured in high-profile shows, international
biennials, and smaller stand-alone, site-specific
exhibitions. In each work of art, Campos-Pons
beckons the audience to experience her personal
history, the history of Cuba, and the trauma and
resilience of African enslavement and Chinese
indenture, which are both part of her ancestry.
Campos-Pons’s prolific artistic production, which
began in the 1980s, continues to engage with
memory and materiality, the feminine and the
resilient.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons
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Women’s Work
In many ways, the nine panels of Angel’s
Trumpets, Devil’s Bells narrate a story of gestures
to different preoccupations within her career.
The large-scale installation is at once a look
forward and a look backward for Campos-
Pons. At first glance, the layered mixed-media
collages seem to break from the artist’s more
recent photographic self-portraitures and yet
it is a retrospective in the way it cites former
artistic focuses on women, sexuality, and an
unapologetic feminist practice.
The spiritual and the ritual are central to
Campos-Pons’s work. Such is the significance
of including in Angel’s Trumpets, Devil’s Bells
the campana , a flower that can only be found
in Cuba. Possibly a natural hybrid between
D.candida and D. suaveolens, the leaf and
the flower are known for their medicinal and
purifying properties in Afro-Cuban horticultural
knowledge and herbalism. Flowers are a
recurring theme in Campos-Pons’s work. While
it would be predictable to misinterpret the floral
mapping on a woman’s body as essentializing
femininity, for Campos-Pons, the campana
refers to entangled female genealogies and
labors in the African and Cuban diasporas.
Such entanglements include the blending
of cosmologies indigenous to Cuba. If the
archetypal pillars of womanhood offered in
Roman Catholicism are the Virgin Mother,
the artist’s namesake Mary Magdalene—the
redeemed prostitute (sex worker), and Eve
(responsible for Original Sin)—then in the
tradition of Santería and other Afro-Cuban
religions, Campos-Pons offers Yemaya. This
orisha’s presence recurs in Angel’s Trumpets,
Devil’s Bells through the campana, used as part of
orisha worship and rituals. The desiccated and
delicate flowers sprout from the head of a black
woman and are flattened and preserved on
Opposite Page:
María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Angel’s Trumpets, Devil’s Bells (detail), 2019. Mixed media on Arches archival paper, 9 panels, 40 x 26 inches.
Courtesy of the artist.