Artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons at Rutgers-New Brunswick

The Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities is pleased to announce that renowned artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair of Fine Arts, Vanderbilt University, has been named the 2019-20 Estelle Lebowitz Endowed Visiting Artist
at Rutgers University. The Lebowitz program annually brings to the
University community and general public the work and ideas of
exceptional women artists through solo exhibitions, lectures, and short
campus residencies.

Campos-Pons’ solo exhibition, Sea and Self,
will be on view from September 3 – December 13, 2019, in the Mary H.
Dana Women Artists Series Galleries, Douglass Library. The exhibit is
curated by art historian and curator, Tatiana Flores,
Associate Professor in the departments of Latino & Caribbean Studies
and Art History, Rutgers University. To accompany the exhibition, CWAH
will publish a comprehensive online catalog.

On Thursday, October 24th at 5pm in the Mabel Smith Douglass Room, Douglass Library, there will be a reception in honor of Campos-Pons followed by an artist’s lecture from 5:30 – 6:30pm.

Sea and Self presents artworks produced by María Magdalena
Campos-Pons (b. 1959, Matanzas, Cuba) from the late 1990s through the
present which meditate on the sea, a constant theme in her work. The sea
looms large in the Caribbean imaginary. Derek Walcott’s poem “The Sea
Is History” (1977)—which is referenced in the title of an important
recent exhibition which features Campos-Pons’ work—explains that for the
descendants of African slaves brought to the Caribbean, the sea was the
keeper of memory. Campos-Pons draws on this rich tradition in works
such as She Always Knew of the Space In-Between (2019) which
features drawings of the silhouettes of two African sculptures, but she
also complicates it by making reference to the female gender, here and
elsewhere. Works such as Nesting IV (2000), a panel of four
large-scale Polaroids, position the artist as divided in half by the sea
but remaining connected through locks of hair that unite the four parts
of the composition.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons’ work on the sea makes important
contributions to art history, Caribbean Studies, and the environmental
humanities. By repeatedly underscoring the ocean and thinking about it
through cycles, she resists categories organized around national
narratives that seek to place art in a linear continuum. Not only is the
sea a site of loss and memory, a point Caribbean thinkers have often
made, but it is also a mother and giver that is under threat. This
exhibition will highlight how the artist intersects with emerging fields
such as critical ocean studies and the blue humanities, celebrating her
pioneering work and unique vision.

Campos-Pons’ works form part of over 30 museum collections, including
the Newark Museum; the Smithsonian Institution; the Whitney Museum of
American Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of
Canada; the Victoria and Albert Museum; The Museum of Modern Art, New
York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Pérez Art Museum Miami; and
the Fogg Art Museum. She is represented by Gallery Wendi Norris in San
Francisco, CA.

Venue Information

The exhibition and event are free and open to public. The Mary
H. Dana Women Artists Series Galleries are located in the Mabel Smith
Douglass Library (8 Chapel Drive, New Brunswick, NJ 08901). Gallery
hours are Monday through Friday 9am – 10pm, and are subject to the
university libraries operating schedule. *WEEKENDS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. Further information about the exhibition, event, accessibility services, and parking can be found at cwah.rutgers.edu. Visitors to the university are required to register their vehicles online. Please direct inquiries to: womenart@cwah.rutgers.edu.

Sponsors

The exhibition and event are funded by the Estelle Lebowitz Memorial Fund and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
Co-sponsors: Douglass Residential College; Department of Women’s &
Gender Studies; Institute for Women’s Leadership; Department of Latino
& Caribbean Studies; Zimmerli Art Museum; Department of Art History;
Center for Latino Arts and Culture; Rutgers Global.

General Information

The Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities (CWAH) is a
university-wide unit reporting to the Associate Vice President for
Strategic Initiatives under the auspices of the Office of the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs. CWAH is a consortium member of the Institute for Women’s Leadership,
at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. The Mary H. Dana Women
Artists Series is a program of CWAH in partnership with Rutgers
University Libraries.