Small School presents María Magdalena Campos-Pons

Join us for the talk “Alternative Education in the Global South” by Small School visiting artist and 2023 MacArthur Fellow María Magdalena Campos-Pons. While Campos-Pons works directly as a professor of art in the US South, her international efforts focus largely on arts collaborations and education in the Global South. In this talk she threads connections between these souths as she discusses her own approach to alternative education.

Campos-Pons is a multidisciplinary artist exploring how memory, spirituality, and identity are entangled with personal and collective histories across the Caribbean. Her artistic practice spans photography, performance, sculpture, drawing, painting, and video, and her works often take the form of richly layered, multimedia installations. She forges connections between her own experiences as a Cuban woman and global issues of displacement and inequality.

Beyond her own artistic practice, Campos-Pons establishes platforms for other artists to advance and exhibit their work. She is the founder and director of the Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice, an organization that connects institutions and artists from the US South and Global South and supports creative work that resists and repairs legacies of inequality.

About the artist
María Magdalena Campos-Pons received degrees from the National School of Art, Havana (1980), and the Higher Institute of Art, Havana (1985), and attended the MFA program at the Massachusetts College of Art (1988). She held the Bunting Fellowship in Visual Arts at Harvard University in 1993–94. Campos-Pons currently serves as the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair and Professor of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University. She launched Intermittent Rivers, a multi-artist initiative in Matanzas, Cuba, as part of the 2019 Havana Biennial. Her work has been presented at many venues, including the Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University; Peabody Essex Museum; National Portrait Gallery; Museum of Modern Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; List Visual Arts Center, MIT; Pérez Art Museum; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Johannesburg Biennial; Gwangju Biennale; Documenta; Venice Biennale; and the Brooklyn Museum.

Photo: Courtesy of the artist