She rose to prominence in the late 1980s for her work on female sexuality. Mara Magdalena Campos-Pons began her career during the emergence of the new Cuban Art movement, which began in opposition to the Cuban state’s dictatorial nature.
According to the Barbara Thumm website, she interspersed Afro-Cuban sentiments in her art when the artistic movement was redefining the themes it wanted to focus on. Campos-Pons, on the other hand, focused on sexuality, the place of women in modern Cuba, and how women were framed in art history.
When she began to raise the issue of feminism, it served as a springboard for the future feminist movement in Cuba.
Campos-Pons was born in 1959 in the Cuban province of Matanzas, in the town of La Vega. She has an intriguing hybrid ancestry. She was raised on a sugar plantation and is descended from enslaved Nigerians, indentured Chinese servants, and Spanish immigrants.
She arrived in the United States in 1992, at a time when Cuba’s communist regime was cracking down on dissenting critics of the government. She spent the majority of her professional life in Boston before relocating to Nashville to take up the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University.
Photography, painting, sculpture, performance, and videography are among Campos-Pons’ interests. These are the vehicles through which she expresses her themes, focusing on her Afro-Caribbean heritage and lived experience in the diaspora at times.
In her art, she emphasized slavery, the migration of Black immigrants, religion, and spirituality. Gender, race, ethnicity, personal, and collective identities were among the other themes she addressed in her work.
According to Marquette University, Campos-Pons held an exhibition in the 1990s that included photographs, photographic installations, and artistic works that reflected on the sea. Campos-Pons finds inspiration in water for her visual art and manipulates it in various forms to convey her message. According to Marquette University, she uses the sea as a metaphor and site for exploring the key themes of her practice.
In “The Sea Is History,” Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott emphasized the importance of the sea in the lives of descendants of African slaves shipped to Cuba. Many philosophers and artists in the Caribbean regard the sea as a symbol of trauma and bonding, but Campos-Pons challenges this widely held belief. She sees the sea as a place of loss and memory, as well as a mother and a giver who is under threat.
According to Marquette University, her work on the sea makes significant contributions to art history, Afro-Caribbean Studies, and environmental humanities.
According to the Thumm website, Campos-Pons’ art has been shown at documenta14 in Kassel, as well as in Athens, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the First Liverpool Biennial, the Dakar Biennale in Senegal, the Venice Biennale, the Johannesburg Biennial, and the Guangzhou Triennial in China. The Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Canada, the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, the Miami Art Museum, and the Fogg Art Museum, as well as the Ludwig Stiftung in Aachen, own her work.