By F. Lennox Campello
Last month I had the pleasure and honor of attending a lecture by the immensely talented and super hard-working artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC as part of that school’s Rubenstein Guest Artist Program.
Campos-Pons was born in La Vega, in the province of Matanzas, Cuba, a sugar plantation town where her Nigerian-born great-great grandfather worked as a slave in Cuba’s brutal slave system, in which sugar mill owners often owned thousands of slaves and where death and rape were common parts of life.
In Spanish, Matanzas means “Slaughter” or “Killings” — imagine a US state or a Canadian province named “Slaughters” as a reminder of the brutality of the Spaniards’ treatment of the native American tribes (within a couple of decades of the Europeans arrival in Cuba, nearly the entire native Taino population had been wiped out by disease, murder and suicide). The name “Matanzas” commemorates the actual suicide deaths of tens of thousands of Taino Indians who committed suicide rather than become slaves to their white masters from Spain as Kubanacan (as Cuba was known in the native Taino language) became a colony of the mighty Kingdom of Spain as the world entered the so-called “Spanish Century.”
When Cuba’s native population died out from suicide or disease, the Conquistadores began the new continent’s slave trade and brought in African slaves purchased from the Arabs, and mostly on the brutal labor of their backbones, a new Cuban nation was eventually forged.
Moreover, as an Afro-Cuban woman with this history in her bloodlines, Campos-Pons has used her cultural and racial background as the initial key theme of her own work, with long ties to her Cuban homeland, but also with a powerful influence of her evolving presence as an American.
The 2023 MacArthur Award winner is also an exceptional and gifted speaker, and immediately at the start of her lecture invited the audience to consider life here on Earth as an opportunity: “We should be courageous and participate in this experience,” she said, adding that no one bleeds blue. “Blood is red for every single man and woman on this little island—Earth. That’s why I am not an immigrant, I am an Earthling.”
Campos-Pons discussed her ongoing project back in her Cuban hometown, where children were invited to create artwork from the meager materials available – for me the video was a palpable experience of the human spirit, especially coming from that poor island, which has been brutalized by a harsh Communist dictatorship for over sixty years. She also shared a seven-minute video installation (titled “In the Beginning”), which featured dozens of original watercolors in a mesmerizing arrangement of art and music. She calls it her “melancholy reflection and hope for planet Earth.”
After the video, the artist and Dorothy Moss, a former curator at the National Portrait Gallery who in the past brought performance art to the Portrait Gallery by commissioning a piece from Campos-Pons, held an audience participation discussion which was also exceptionally interesting in many levels.
Kudos to Sidwell’s Director of Art Exhibitions Aaron Brophy, who has not only completely revived and revitalized the school’s exhibition program, but also the Rubenstein Guest Artist Program, which has been an endowed, flagship program at Sidwell Friends for over four decades.
Campos-Pons parting words? “Question everything! The truth only evolves when we ask questions.”
From Sidwell Friends to Alexandria, where the Art League League’s annual Holiday Ceramics Sale features hundreds of one-of-a-kind ceramic vessels and sculptures created by 40 Art League artists and students. The sale is Friday, December 6, from 5 to 9 pm, Saturday, December 7, from 10 am to 5 pm and Sunday, December 8, from 12 noon to 4 pm at The Art League’s Madison Street Annex location at 305 Madison Street.
While in Alexandria I want to highlight Nepenthe Gallery, located at 7918 Fort Hunt Road. The gallery stages regular “ART + WINE + CHEESE” exhibitions and last month they featured the exceptional sweet works of Jennifer Barlow.
They call her “our artist with a sweet tooth!”, and I couldn’t agree more, as Barlow is easily one of the top sweet focused painters in the DMV!
What does that mean Lenster? Asks our constant readers…
In the hands of a skilled artist, pretty much anything can become art, no matter how mundane, and Barlow is not only a highly skilled painter, but also a superbly talented artist, who elevates the mundane subject of sweets, candy, cakes, etc. to the sublime level of fine art!
Her subject matter is already packed with not only calories, but also with color, and Barlow employs her eye for color and talent to rediscover it within the two dimensions of painting, where it suddenly becomes a fantastic exploration of color and composition.
The gallery is located at 7918 Fort Hunt Road (Hollin Hall Shopping Center) in the Mount Vernon area of Alexandria. Jennifer’s exhibit will be up at Nepenthe until December 18th.
Later this year Nepenthe will join the rare number of DMV area galleries that participate in the annual Art Basel Miami Beach week of art fairs in the Greater Miami area during the first week of December, where they will be displaying several artists at the Aqua Art Fair December 4-8.
This is a giant step for any gallery, and as readers of this column know, a step that I have discussed many times over the years, especially in reference to the first week of December in Miami, where the 20+ art fairs deliver the art world’s number one art event on this planet!
About the Author: F. Lennox Campello’s art news, information, gallery openings, commentary, criticism, happenings, opportunities, and everything associated with the global visual arts scene with a special focus on the Greater Washington, DC area has been a premier source for the art community for over 20 years. Since 2003, his blog has been the 11th highest ranked art blog on the planet with over SIX million visitors.