The Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery Displays Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons' Drawings

Written by Alan Partridge Wednesday, 12 October 2011 21:58

Nashville, Tennessee.- The Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of "Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons—Mama/Reciprocal Energy", on view from October 13th through December 8th. María Magdalena Campos-Pons is one of the most significant artists to emerge from the Cuban post-revolutionary era. While installation art, performance art, photography, and cultural activism continue to define the core of Campos-Pons' work of the last two decades, this exhibition will be the first that almost exclusively highlights her drawings. The drawings found within the Vanderbilt exhibition are a direct reflection of the artist’s exploration of themes central to her practice, such as issues of identity, exile, and displacement as an Afro-Cuban artist living in America.

The exhibition will also feature several drawings that address specific performances the artist has presented over the course of her career, one of which is a collaborative work she created with her son. This later body of work is the artist’s attempt at “putting the [performances] in a memory box, [in order to create] the essence of the moment.” The drawings will be accompanied by a three-channel video that examines questions surrounding the nature of energy from an intriguing perspective. In this piece, titled "Interiority or Hill-Sided Moon" (2003), images of constellations and the moon play off of images of flowers and gardens—the expansive alongside the intimate. In describing this work, Campos-Pons explained that she was fascinated with the proximity “of stars being born along with the moment just prior to the blossoming of a flower, [full of] a sense of anticipation.” Born in Matanzas in 1959, Campos-Pons was educated in Cuba at the Escuela Nacional de Arte (1976–1979) and Instituto Superior de Arte (1980–1985). In 1988 she continued her studies as an exchange student in the graduate program at the Massachusetts College of Art. Campos-Pons has been honored with numerous international solo and group exhibitions from such institutions as MOMA P.S.1; Tate Liverpool; the Smithsonian, Washington, D.C.; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which hosted a 20-year retrospective of CamposPons’ work in 2006 that traveled to the Bass Museum in Miami. Campos-Pons has also been included in a number of prestigious international art surveys, including the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001; the Johannesburg Biennale, Johannesburg, South Africa; the First Liverpool Biennial; the Dak’ART Biennale in Senegal; and most recently, the Guangzhou Triennial, China.Her art can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; the National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among many others.

The Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee, is a leading collegiate art gallery. Beginning with Anna C. Hoyt's generous donation of 105 Old Master and modern prints more than 50 years ago, the collection has continued to flourish and increase the depth, diversity, and number of its holdings. Now totaling more than 5,500 works, it serves to illustrate the history of world art in its most creative and comprehensive aspects. This art historical collection is the only one of its kind in the area, serving the needs of students and the wider community. The collection has grown to include strong works in East Asian art with the Harold P. Stern Collection, the Chauncey P. Lowe Collection, and the Herman D. Doochin Collection; European Old Master paintings with the Samuel H. Kress Collection; paintings from the Barbizon school; and African, Oceanic, and Pre-Columbian art and artifacts from the Marjorie and Leon Marlowe Collection. In recent years, the gallery has sought to increase its holdings of works by internationally recognized contemporary artists. Examples from this portion of the collection include Arion Press' Biotherm by Frank O'Hara with lithographs by Jim Dine; Louis Bourgeois' and Arthur Miller's Homely Girl, A Life, published by Peter Blum Editions; Paesaggi by Mimmo Paladino, published by Waddington Graphics; Leslie Dill's A Word Made Flesh and her Homage to N.S., published by Landfall Press; and Enrique Chagoya's The Enlightened Savage, published by Trillium Press; as well as graphics by artists such as Tjeu Teeuwen, Peter Foolen, Hans Waanders, Kees Verbeck, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Richard Long, Joseph Kosuth, Roni Horn, Mona Hatoum, Hamish Fulton, and Sol LeWitt. In addition to gifts of important pieces from university supporters, objects have been acquired through corporate and special purchases made possible with funds from the Vanderbilt Art Association, the Dr. and Mrs. E. William Ewers Gift for Fine Arts, and numerous private donors. The Fine Arts Collection is used for the development of temporary exhibitions as well as for student study and research. Therefore the entire collection is not on view in its entirety at any given time; however, the majority of the collection can be explored through our Collection DatabaseAdmission is free and the public is welcome to attend. Visit the gallery’s website at ... www.vanderbilt.edu/gallery

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