The Women's Work Issue Women's Work. Pen and Brush. 2019 | Page 28

pen + brush x of note
THROUGH THIS FIGURE, WE SEE CAMPOS-PONS’S TANGLED
GENEALOGY BETWEEN WOMEN — ­SISTERS, MOTHERS,
GRANDMOTHERS — ­AS UMBILICAL. IT IS A TANGLE OF BRAIDS, OF
DREADLOCKS, OF THREADS, AND STRANDS KNOTTED, ALL FAMILIAR
MOTIFS OF HER WORK.
Communist Cuba when religion was strictly
Arches archival paper. Through this figure, we
see Campos-Pons’s tangled genealogy between prohibited though practiced behind closed
women — ­ sisters, mothers, grandmothers — ­ a s doors. Race equality was declared by the
Cuban state and yet African heritage and
umbilical. It is a tangle of braids, of dreadlocks,
cultural practice was clearly denigrated and
of threads, and strands knotted, all familiar
devalued.
motifs of her work.
In her naming of the work, the artist employs
the dual language of “Angel’s Trumpets,”
for which its known in Cuba and also labels
them as the “Devil’s Bells.” Framing the
flower as having the power for good or for
evil is a matter of orientation and intent for
Campos-Pons who hears the music of both
instruments. Indeed, the campana conjures
a childhood of contradictions for Campos-
Pons. Her father was a farmer for most of his
life and would collect herbs from the forest
El Monte, signifying the centrality of Yoruba
cosmologies for the Campos-Pons family
even though these rites were not always
publicly acknowledged. Though she and her
parents were not initiated into Lucumi, one
of Campos-Pons’s grandmothers, who she
never met, had been a Santería priestess.
One of her great grandmothers migrated
from Canton, China to Cuba and labored in
sugar mills. Campos-Pons also discovered
her childhood home in Matanzas was the
former sugar plantation barracks that housed
enslaved people, including one of her great
grandfathers. Campos-Pons came of age in
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The nine panels of Angel’s Trumpets, Devil’s Bells
are a familiar geometry or grid-like ordering
of space in Campos-Pons’s work, signifying
separation, segmentation, exile, and cohesion
as the poetics of the diasporic condition. One
panel features shredded pieces of United
States’ Transportation Security Administration
(TSA) tape. The government is torn. But it is
also salvaged, displayed, and archived. These
objects that symbolize the crossing of borders
reflect another recurring theme in Campos-
Pons’s work—that of longing, of waiting, of the
liminal space of migration. She often speaks
of her own migration experience of disruption
and the impact of embargos in spaces such as
airports. In tandem, the border emerges as
a space of red tape, bureaucracy, biometrics
surveillance, and rupture. Yet it is also a space
of becoming—emergency and emergence—for
the artist who just last year was naturalized as
a U.S. citizen.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Angel’s Trumpets, Devil’s Bells, 2019. Mixed media on Arches archival paper, 9 panels, 40 x 26 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Women’s Work
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