Barbara London: My guest today is María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Born in 1959 in Matanzas, Cuba, she trained at the Escuela Nacional de Arte in Havana between 1976 and 1979. She went on to study at the Havana Instituto Superior de Arte during the period of 1980 to 1985 and attended the MFA program at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the Bunting Institute Radcliffe College Harvard University 1993- 1994. Magda is an active and very much in-demand artist and speaker. She is the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair Professor of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. She recently received the ARTnews Lifetime Achievement Award, recognizing her for her contributions to art and for her outstanding retrospective that opened in 2023 at the Brooklyn Museum, went on to the Frist Museum in Nashville, the Nasher Museum, and will now be presented at the Getty in Los Angeles. Last year, she was honored with a MacArthur Fellowship.
Our conversation is the grand finale of the entire Barbara London Calling podcast series, which I launched four years ago. It began in 2020 during Covid when, like me, artists were all in lockdown and stuck at home. It was the perfect moment to dialogue with such artists as Anri Sala, Tracey Moffatt, Lorraine O’Grady, and others from around the world. I wanted to know what was on their mind during such a challenging moment of enormous change. I continued the project over the next few years, still interested in understanding what the changes to art practice were. With this third and final series, I’ve now spoken with a total of 34 artists, and each has generously shared insight into what their art is about. Magda, thank you so much for joining me for the Season 3 finale—and the series finale—of Barbara London Calling.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Barbara, I am so honored to be in such great company and that you have chosen to invite me for the grand finale. You called me many years ago, when you invited me to be part of your project at that moment. I received a letter from you in 1994, and that, too, was sort of a calling. So, I am happy to be back here in conversation with you. Thank you so much.