Autobiographical Art
School of Visual Arts Contemporary Perspectives Lecture Series Presents María Magdalena Campos-Pons
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Multimedia artist María Magdalena Campos-Ponsgives the second lecture in the CFA school of visual arts 2007–2008Contemporary Perspectives Lecture series, which brings professionalartists, including painters, sculptors, printmakers, graphic designers,and art educators and critics, to campus to share their experiences.Campos-Pons talks about the relationship between events in her life andher artwork. She includes slides and videos of her work andperformances and explains how different pieces were affected by lifechanges, such as the birth of her son. Campos-Pons also explores thedifference between personal motivation and sentimentality, saying shedoes not try to avoid what she terms “corniness” in her themes. “Forme, the idea of being corny is about being sentimental if I need to,because you touch a feeling or a place,” she says. “It is important tome not to be scared away from putting into the context of my workissues that may be corny. All the artists that have been important tome are people that I believe really look at the question of what ispersonal, what moved them.”
Campos-Pons also shows the audiencedifferent works she has created and performed, which range in mediafrom painting and sculpture to photographs and interactiveperformances, and explains how each work offers a new opportunity forengagement with the audience. “I have a lot of tolerance for diverseforms of arts,” she says. “I can consume a lot of different things.”
November 26, 2007, 6 p.m.
CFA Concert Hall
About the speaker:
María Magdalena Campos-Pons was born in Cuba, to a family of Nigerian descent, and immigrated to Boston in 1991. She teaches at the Boston Museum School.Her works have been exhibited in the United States, Canada, Japan,Norway, France, Italy, and Cuba, and her collaborations with herhusband, musician Neil Leonard, have been exhibited at the 49th VeniceBiennial and the Museum of Modern Art, purchased by the NationalGallery of Canada, and presented by the U.S. State Department at the DakArt/Dakar Biennial in Senegal. She was the 2007 recipient of the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park’s Rappaport Prize.
Campos-Pons’ work includes When I Am Not Here/Estoy Alla, Meanwhile the Girls Were Playing, and the performance piece Gifts/Regalos, which premiered at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) in 2007. A survey of her work, Everything Is Separated by Water, was exhibited at the IMA and at the Bass Museum in Miami Beach, Fla., in 2007. She lives in Brookline, Mass.
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