To speak the unspeakable, to bear witness, and to behold the truth are at the core of María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s sweeping forty-year career as a multidisciplinary artist. Her practice spans a range of intermixed mediums, from installations, performances, and photographic works to paintings, sculptures, and videos that address race, history, memory, gender, religion-spirituality, and sociopolitical issues. Much of her work is created from an autobiographical narrative based on her family stories and background as a Cuban-born artist descended from Hispanic and Chinese immigrants and enslaved Nigerians brought to the island in the 19th century. Campos-Pons utilizes her intersectionality as a source of power and position to represent the narratives, experiences, and realities within her work. Her identity and artwork sit within an intangible and in-between space she visualizes through the body as both subject and gesture. The body within Campos-Pon’s work is often staged, fragmented, accumulated, or performed to channel a collective and individual memory of existence and resistance.

In many pieces, Campos-Pons’s use of self-portraiture conveys the spiritual, internal, and embodied knowledge of her family’s and ancestral roots in Santería practices. Developed in 19th-century Cuba, Santería, also known as Regla de Ocha or Lucumí, is a syncretic religion derived from the traditional West African religion of Yoruba and Catholicism. In the curator and scholar Carmen Hermo’s essay “María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold,” she notes how Campos-Pons taps into “Santería’s emphasis on embodied knowledge in practices like ritual processions, herbalism, songs, and chants, and in the foundational Yoruba belief that existence spans two realms: the physical and tangible, and the spiritual.” The emphasis on embodied knowledge is critical to Campos-Pons’s practice, where she addresses the historical legacy of colonialism, the transatlantic enslaved trade, human suffering, and survivor’s guilt by tapping into collective and individual memory as a method for healing and spiritual cleansing. Her use of memories as her artistic language honors the people, places, and resistive acts of the Americas.

Often, recurring symbols, such as eyes, butterflies, and pomegranates, along with depictions of water, fauna, trees, and plants, function as metaphors and themes connected to the spirituality of healing but also function in the simple ways of remembrance, endurance, confidence, and beauty. Through her work, Campos-Pons gives viewers an emotional connection for contemplation, optimistic strength, the power of survival, and access to energy not typically embraced in our contemporary society. Campos-Pons is an artist who channels the energy of the Black body, experiences, and realities as a form of visual communication to past and present information but, above all, as an homage to future times and possibilities for human existence.