Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons returns to the Ceramics Program

(sketches for Magda's first project this fall)

I am very pleased to announce that Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, returns to the Ceramics Program to begin a year-long residency this week. During her 1998 Radcliffe Bunting Fellowship year Magda worked the Ceramics Program creating text by fusing wire into blocks of slumped glass for her installation Spoken Softly with Mama.

Magda's first project this fall (above images) will engage the throwing skills of Rosanna's friend Ricardo and underglaze painting advice from Meng. She plans to create 40 large porcelain vases brush painted with cross-cultural imagery that includes Fidel Castro as General Chang, an African version of the Buddhist deity Guan Yin, and a Chinese landscape with a sugar cane laborer. The 40 vases will be elements of a sculptural video installation exploring the Chinese connections in her Afro-Cuban heritage. A presentation on Magda's work in progress will be scheduled in a few weeks.

Campos-Pons uses many media to connect with her complex personal and cultural history through reinterpreting rites and myths from her childhood. "My subjects are often my Afro-Cuban relatives as well as myself. My themes are cross cultural, and cross generational; race and gender expressed in symbols of matriarchy and maternity are thematic ideas." Born in Cuba of Nigerian ancestry and trained at the Superior Institute of Art (ISA) in Havana, she has lived and worked in the Boston area since arriving in 1991. In addition to teaching at the Boston Museum School and energizing the Gallery Artists Studio Projects (GASP) in Brookline, which she founded with her husband Neil Leonard, Magda has shown her work in numerous international venues. She currently has an installation at the Guangzhou Triennial, and recently had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a retrospective at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Here is a video introduction to Magda. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5457190437445130515

Magda's work is included in a traveling group exhibition, "Black Womanhood: Icons, Images, and Ideologies of the African Body", currently at Wellesley College from September 17 to December 14, 2008. This Saturday she will be giving a performance at Wellesley College at 6 pm in conjunction with the symposium "Black Womanhood: Icons, Images, and Ideologies of the African Body"

Nancy Selvage