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.

Barbara London: Well, you’re very special and I think you’ve had an amazing year or two yourself. You had a major retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, which then went on to Nashville and will be at the Getty. You’ve received all kinds of awards in the last year or two. Recently Art News gave you a lifetime achievement award, and the Rhode Island School of Design has given you an Honorary Doctorate. You are a force of nature in this world of contemporary art.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons: I’m getting mature. Years are passing by. This is what I think that it all means. I was very happy to have the opportunity of the exhibition, “Behold”, that opened in September of 2023 at Brooklyn Museum, then went to the Frist Museum here in Nashville, and in February will open at the Getty. This has been an extraordinary moment of recounting, as you say, with all the other accolades and all the other moments of recognition of the work. This has been a beautiful opportunity to sing to all the people that have been part of that journey. Nobody could do this long stretch of time and production without the help and the presence of many other supporter’s and makers. I am grateful.

Barbara London: The art community is very special, where you are an artist and I am a curator. You have inspired many people. You work with drawing and installation, what the artists in this Season 3 of Barbara London Calling do. Many of them work with sound. Some are performative. Several speakers have a connection to Nashville. Matthew Ritchie’s installation at the Frist Art Museum, A Garden in the Flood, was a collaboration with the composer Hanna Benn and the remarkable Fisk Jubilee Singers, artists based at Fisk University. Where you live there is a fascinating community, which includes Raheleh Filsoofi. I spoke with her the other day, about how she works with sound and with ceramics. I’m sure you see her often.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons: As you mentioned, I have been in Nashville now for seven years. When I arrived here, one of the things that I tried to do was to invigorate, in some way, the connections and the sort of relations within the community. So, I established Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice, a research project that allows for a conversation and a real engagement between different institutions here, Fisk University, Vanderbilt University, Millions of Conversations, which is a series of different investigations led by Vanderbilt alumna and lawyer Samar Ali, and the Frist Museum. When you talk about this idea of the diversity of the community and the engagement with the community, one of the things that I wanted to put to test was how we could create different engagement within this particular city, within this particular history, and also narratives that are peculiar to this site.

Fisk University is an extraordinary institution. When I arrived here, my son already was enrolled there and was working with Dr. Paul Kwami. We lost Paul Kwami a year ago. Dr. Paul Kwami, Ghanaian by birth, was the director of the Jubilee Singers. And the Jubilee Singers, to make this very brief, is why Nashville is called City of Music. They were a group of Black singers and scholars who started literally singing all across the United States, to find resources to build the building that is now the Jubilee Hall at Fisk University. That was something that was very inspirational, because when we speak nowadays of artist agency, the Jubilee Singers were initiators of those kind of initiatives. So, when Matthew Ritchie was invited to work at the Frist Museum, because of our collaboration with the Frist Museum, we, EADJ, were able to help and assist Matthew to create the connection with the Jubilee Singers and with composer Hanna Benn, and create this new project together with local artists that were a very important part of the Ritchie project.

The same with Raheleh Filsoofi. I was part of the committee who hired Raheleh when she applied to Vanderbilt. Once she arrived, being aware of the diversity of her practice, again, EADJ helped and assisted Raheleh to create one of the very first performances that she initiated at her arrival at Vanderbilt with her partner, Reza Filsoofi. I have been interested in immersing myself in the investigation and the use of the sonic environment in my pieces. But I have committed in the past, in the present, and will be in the future to support other artists that are interested in the art. Participating in such an investigation is happening right now with artist Vesna Pavlović, who is a photographer who, after the Tennessee Triennial, has been involved working with local musicians. So, in some way I feel that I have provided a conduit for initiation and for development of such projects.

In my own practice, I have been using sound from the very, very beginning of my performative practice in Cuba, and in Canada, where I did a performance in 1990 called the Voice of the Silence. The sonic aspect was more in a cacum way, because it was the silence of the body, the silence of the presence, and writing in the body, as a way to make people come in to communicate with words of sounds that are not said but that are implied. As you know, I have done large investigation of both ritualistic history and contemporary ideas and use of sounds in the world. But I wanted to focus primarily on how important it has been, since my arrival at Vanderbilt, to immerse my practice and the practice of others who I have brought here to multi-inter-transdisciplinary investigations and research, which try to figure out new ways to narrate and new ways to engage with urgency of our time, and with our history and the important continuum of language and building of art narratives.

Barbara London: I think all of that is so important. Things are not rigid. We have definitions, but definitions always get broken down. And we have mediums, but mediums get crossed and that’s where interesting things happen, where you cross it. Currently in Season 3, both words, sound, and history have been very important topics. In his next work, Stan Douglas goes back to D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation. Having these artists participate, I find it fascinating. I learn and I hope the listeners of the podcast series learn, as well.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons: I feel that for my generation, which is the generation of almost all the artists that you have interviewed for this podcast, the question of the medium, the fluidity of narration, the fluidity of the language of art making, has been very important. It’s very important that this group of makers, which I find myself part of, are not set in just one particular medium. That is in some way maybe post-conceptual, to use a term that we know, but also is in the familiarity of the diversity of the range of media techniques for the people that are less versed in the conversation of visuality and the many ramifications. There is an extended field of every area that visuality exists—an extended field for drawing, an extended field for painting, an extended field for sculpture, an extended field even for installation art.

We think of installation as a play in which many mediums and the fluidity of language come together. You could have a sculptural element, you could have sonic elements, you could have performative elements that constitute the work, as much of the people that participate in the work. All of that is important. You have painting spaces that could be immersive. You have drawing spaces that could be immersive, from the point of view of installation. We find ourselves in a time and in a moment trying to redefine the language and the materiality of how we construct the narrative of our practice and make beautiful, useful, and accessible meaning to our viewers of the ideas that we want to express.

When I think in the piece that I showed with you in 1998 in MoMA, I remember how complex that piece was. There was embroidery, photography that was transferred to textile, video layered in textile, glass, and six channels of video with a channel of sound. All of that introduced a very particular kind of narrative in what was now, Spoken Softly with Mama. The stories of a group of Black Cuban women, literally a century of grandmothers, great-grandmothers, mothers, daughters, all together in one narrative. Those kinds of narratives and the presentation of those narratives were at some point maybe even disconcerting. There was something new. Video was not new, sound was not new, embroidery was not new, photography was not new, sculptural glass was not new. What was interesting was the fluidity and the daring to merge all of those scenes in this kind of new scenario, in this new enactment.

It’s a staging, that is always true for installation. That is always true for performativity. I am thinking back now to Matthew Ritchie, to his piece at the Frist Museum, and how immersive it was. He forced us to follow three narratives visually and also sonically. The incredible amount of written information that was in that piece, in some way made the piece both poetical and metaphysical. This is very true for many of the artists that you have included before in your series. For instance, when in the work of Raheleh you think back to her origins, place it in some way back to the history of the instrument, to the material, clay, and to creating a new proposition now in Tennessee, in Nashville. Those are fundamental preoccupations in my own practice, fundamental to my practice as a professor. I introduced the practice of performance in the Art Department at Vanderbilt or expanded the practice of installation.

Remember, when I started teaching at the School of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston in 1993, there was almost no one book about installation art. We are still building the immersive environment. With the development of technology, those spaces and those possibilities are expanding. You were talking about Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. I remember seeing his very beautiful, delicate scenes. He did a piece in the Havana Biennale, which was the air, the breath of an important Cuban singer Omara Portuondo. Last Breath (2012) was a beautiful metaphor for speech, for speaking and for sound. Sound is the opportunity to expand and exteriorize by the force of air, volume, and capacity of the lungs. To contain the voice of a singer in a brown paper bag as a sculpture, as an installation it was glorious.

This is new language, this is a new material. When I think of that, it comes to my mind conversations and reflections I had when I was very young, talking with other colleagues about the new aesthetics that my generation was envisioning, including the new aesthetic of my generation of Afro-Caribbean descendants, artists of the African diaspora. I remember having conversations in 1988 with people like Kobena Mercer, Isaac Julien, Coco Fusco, thinking about what are the aesthetics of black diaspora , what are the scenes that we want to put out there in the world? I believe those were/are important core ideas of my practice and important for my work as a facilitator today, as a conduit for others to realize and to produce work around some of the projects that through the years I have as the Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice.

Barbara London: What you are doing is important, especially when your work is put out for the public. As a curator for many years at MoMA, sometimes the curatorial team would be afraid that the public wouldn’t be able to understand a work. But I think people are smart and capable, and I think your approach is important.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons: I am very serious about giving credit to the intelligence of the viewer, to give absolute control and trust. There is a silent connection, an invisible link between the maker and the receiver. The public is a very important part of the making. By historical experience, I think that the history of art and history of knowledge in general are important, because art is another form of making and proposing knowledge and information and new ideas.

I am very invested in the idea that the sociability of the work is very important, from that position. Maybe in some moment in the 20th century, my work ended at the studio. I think that my work continued when I encountered the viewer. The eye of the beholder is as important as my brain or my hand or my heart or my soul when I am doing the work. Many times, when I am making a piece, I think of the viewer with a sense of both responsibility and gratitude. My work is made not just for me but for others. The work completes itself when it’s able to complete that line of conduit, of manifestation, of information, and self. I am very attentive to the viewers. I am interested in talking with people, and I actually test my own access to people.

Since I moved to Nashville, I have this practice of meeting a stranger every single day. Every day I am out of my house, I meet somebody that I don’t know. I always think of them as my potential viewer and my potential collaborator, my receiver, the person that is going to expand my belief, my message. As you know, both Kamaal Malak and I work in this platform that we call “radical love”. The idea of radical love is that I am not an artist separated from everybody else. I am just a small, alien individual connected with everyone, the people that know me, the people that don’t know me, the people that are going to interact, the people that are not going to interact with me.

I am making small little marks in this passing through life. I use every opportunity to communicate and to engage with another fellow earthling. Every single day I am out making sonic intervention and sonic communication, introducing myself and trying by words, by language, by talking, to engage with another human. Individuals that I encounter in the most unexpected situations, from crossing the street to standing in line, waiting for something in the airport, the pharmacy, the store, a restaurant, a museum, in any place. I found that, perhaps besides teaching, the most active form of communication that I do is outside the practice of communication that I attempt in my studio.

Barbara London: I’m curious, do you talk with your students and with other artists about that? I think what you and Kamaal do is very powerful. I think that Raheleh does this. Recently I saw her perform in Miami at the Untitled art fair. Her energy and her spirit showed, and people were very surprised. She had a plate of unfired clay. For about five or so minutes she bit the periphery, so that her tooth marks made a pattern on the periphery of the plate. Normally you would think that beautiful porcelain ceramics like Wedgwood have a lovely pattern. But here she was baldly performing this action right in front of people. At first there was just me and a couple of others, then suddenly there were a hundred people.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons: I think the history of the body as a vessel for performativity is a long one. Again, I come back to our history with that. We are all, be Raheleh now doing performance, or Yoko Ono, who many years ago let people cut her dress, and all of the in-betweens. The body is the conduit; the body is the instrument. There are so many artists, some very well known, some less known.

I think about María Teresa Hincapié, a Colombian artist who gave away everything that she owned, everything, and started a walk and was a host of anybody that gave her shelter, food. She eliminated any material possession except her body. I would say, metaphorically anybody that she encountered was the interlocutor. In some way, when I am thinking about meeting a stranger every day as performativity, I think back to María Teresa Hincapié, who did that very systematically, in a very radical form of engagement with others.

I think that many of the artists of our generation find different ways to construct a vision of how do we deal with—I don’t want to call it this functionality because our world has been always dysfunctional and functional—trying to be vessels of preoccupations, of reflections that are intimate and at the same time have a level of sociability on many levels. I think this is very important. I am both interested in the element of performativity that centers my body, but the one that also centers the body of others.

In Cuba in 2011, I started this persona FeFa, for family abroad, familia afuera, familia extranjera, FeFa. It was about the relation between the body in this junction with geography, when you need to leave the geography that you’re born in and then locate in another place. The people who are left behind, the people who are outside, the encounters, and how that is negotiated. In the case of Cuba, it’s a country under embargo. So, the family abroad brings the material access. I did an entire practice of performativity with that, and that includes street vendors, all sonic. Because pregóneros in Cuba are people that go block by block selling goods.

I feel that we entered a lot of conversation of trade and exchange in performativity. I love the possibility and the potentiality of that. It’s a kind of trade, a kind of negotiation. I am interested personally in the implication of the viewer. For that reason, I made people perform with me, at the same time at the Peabody Museum in Alchemy of the Soul. I made people taste raw sugar cane. Everybody knows about the processing of sugar, but very few people eat the stalk of the sugar cane. Another one to taste is pomegranate juice. There have been so many iterations. I believe here that when you talk about that kind of self-agency of the body, the body reiterating itself in its own potentiality as a teller, not as a tool.

I’m going to be back to your example of Raheleh. When Raheleh bites the edge of the dish, she comes back to a very particular pattern of a very traditional beauty for making of porcelain dishes. I cannot talk in her name, but I suppose she’s talking about all of the complications of being an Iranian outside Iran, living here. All the clay that she uses is local, which then is something that in my ideas and theory I call bodies in geography. It means to be in a particular geography in a particular time, in the moment in history, and what that means, and how that affects how we enter the construction of narrative and materiality of the world and work.

Those are very important aspects that have been fundamental and central to my practice, as well to the practice of people that I care about and that I follow and try to bring into the circle that we are personally building and engaging. EADJ has been a place of gathering, a gathering place of ideas, of methodologies, of process. A place for a lot of beauty and for celebration and discontent as well, but has been a place that has been coalescing and putting together all this different aspect of societal activation of art.

That’s what I was interested in when I launched EADJ, to bring artists, curators, critics, and institution all together, especially at an educational institution. From my experience of teaching for many years, sometimes there is a disconnect between academia and the production of art. I have been trying to bring these two things together as practice in a very simple and reachable way.

Barbara, I found this opportunity of talking with you, very beautiful. It is a great honor. Also, I’m very pleased that many of us working here in Tennessee, in Nashville, are part of your podcast. I am very committed to the idea of locality, at the same time that we are global or alien. I am very interested in this idea that we belong to one small place, this little island that we call Earth. I am so pleased that with all your experience, with all the history, with all the work that you have been pioneering, curating, revealing to the world, including me. It’s very special.

Barbara London: It’s very special, this notion of place of community and recognition of the other, especially when we move so fast and have so many buzzes with the internet and social media. Reaching out to each other and other people is fundamental. I appreciate of what you are doing.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Well, thank you. You are a role model. You are really an inspiration, seeing that you have pioneered an incredibly, brave and courageous history of presentation of work, what you have done all your life and for many years at MoMA. I am so pleased to have had the opportunity to continue to work with you in this moment of your career. And I want to say in this conversation how grateful I am of your understanding and how you saw the value, the profundity, the richness of the work of Alicia Henry before she passed, and how much you embraced her in the time that you had the opportunity.

I am forever so grateful to you for that. Again, your vision, your clarity, your courage, putting things out there and engaging with things out there, without fear. It is almost like your God led you to wonderful places and people. I witnessed your engagement, your dedication to Alicia. I wanted to say that because I think that she is such an amazing artist, whose work is going to be seen more and more and more and more.

Barbara London: Since I became a curator over forty years ago, the world has dramatically sped up. Information, as well as connection with one another, is instantly available through social media. This is useful but can also be a curse. What do you think?

María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Well, I am a futuristic thinker. I always welcome new ideas, new propositions, new opportunities. I think that the world since you become a curator has changed a lot. But that could have been said in the beginning of the 20th century. Picasso made Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1906, and then in 1923 we had something very important with Surrealism. And then we had amazing things that happened after World War II for the arts. Then in 1989, we had “Magiciens de la Terre,” an exhibition as a curatorial proposition in Paris, when we saw how vast other languages were, other expression of materiality for making art that has not necessarily been central.

What we have done in the acceleration of information and communication since the beginning of this new platform from social media when Facebook started, and I don’t even remember some of the names of the other things that were there, just that we could communicate faster. That doesn’t change necessarily the quality of things per se. I feel that what it does is it describes and positions us with new opportunities and new possibilities. We know much more about each other, however, have not made our relations get better.

I have been talking about that a lot recently. I feel that one of the things that make us extraordinary humans is our humanity, our capacity for empathy, our capacity to understand each other, when it’s possible. Until we reach that potential, we are still proposing the betterment of what we could be and what we could do. I think communication happens faster. I can talk with my friends in Australia, or in South Africa, or in Saskatoon, almost at the same time. Yes, we have faster ways to get to each other, all of that, but we still are faulty in terms of the opportunity of expression and accepting and embracing each other.

This is what I am. We are very seriously thinking about this idea of radical love. How could we be in the only home that we have, the only home that we know collectively, in a small island called Earth, floating in the vast black material that we don’t know the beginning of or the end. What a beautiful scene. We know that we could coexist here and that we could protect this extraordinary paradise, this heavenly place that could be Earth if we are kind and engaged. I am a romantic, an altruist. I believe that we’re making progress toward that. Because what I have known so far of my own experience of our human condition, we make a lot of mistakes. We advance, and then we go back a few steps, but we are moving forward. I am very interested and welcoming of that.

It’s amazing to see the expansive presence of art from every corner of the planet. It’s beautiful to be participating with that exchange, that communication, and that we are starting to reconsider language that diminishes one practice over other. I think that we have what I call a tabula rasa, in a horizontal line, in which we have much, much more commonality than difference, such as breathing. We take in air to breathe and we take the last breath to die. Such as bleeding. We get pinched and every one of us bleeds red so far, nobody bleeds blue or green to our knowledge, so far. Those are beautiful equalizers, beautiful ways in which it doesn’t matter that they steered very indigenous collective living in the middle of areas, detached from what happened in Meta or what happened in X or what happened in TikTok or what happened in Instagram.

We are all in this tiny little house, in this little scene in which we need the trees for chlorophyll and then oxygen. The understanding of that, the recognition of that, the opportunity to see through this fast way of communication that new technologies allow to us to see the magnificent, the extraordinary scene that is our planet. And see how vulnerable and how entitled and unitedwe want each other as we are, is a very, very beautiful scene.

Barbara, I love how from when you started curating to now, the curatorial field has opened up, expanded, folded, structured in so many incredible ways, and I am so grateful for that. I am interested in two groups of people. I am interested in the people from birth to grade twelve, and I am interested in the people older than 50 or 60 years, because these two groups need each other for the continuum of the species, for the continuum of history, for the continuum of evolutionary scene, for what we don’t know yet. I am very interested in all that I don’t know.

I am very curious about what is there that is awaiting us. So, I welcome artificial intelligence, I welcome all the platforms that they communicate. I believe that all of that is part of the procession of progression of our experience. When we were in pandemia, when you started this program, we all were isolated. I was thinking, “Oh my God, I am in this bird house looking out from the windows, separated from everything.” But what an interesting time that was for introspection, for thinking about what made us human, in what way we are so precious and peculiar. At the same time during the pandemic, I did an entire series of drawings that I call Miasma because that was the first time that I felt we are so attached to the umbilical cord of our vulnerability as human, and our strength as human. That was an eye-opener for everyone. And what I know or what I have experienced from history, it takes a long time for us to completely comprehend what has happened in our time.

I am still thinking that we are in the progress of the miasma, what happens in war, societally, ideologically, politically, economically, all of that. Transgressions, encounters, difficulties—all those things are part of this process of transformation that happens to all of us as humans. That is what I am thinking: love, a feeling, a state that is primarily understood to some extent for all of us. Not reproduction, but radical love, which is so needed for our future.

I am very grateful that I was part of the generation that worked with curators who were so capable and brave in looking around and calling things with new names, proposing other futures—thinking about not one future, but a multiplicity of futures. I love that. So I’m optimistic. We haven’t seen the best of us yet.

Barbara London: Like you, I think we will always discover new possibilities. Like you, I’ve always been an optimist at heart. So maybe we close there.

Barbara London Calling is produced by Ryan Leahey, with audio engineer Amar Ibrahim and production assistant Sharifa Moore. Web design by Sol Skelton and Vivian Selbo.

Support for Barbara London Calling 3.0 is generously provided by the Richard Massey Foundation and by an anonymous donor.

Special thanks to Masayoshi Fujita and Erased Tapes Music for graciously providing our music. Thanks to Independent Curators International for their help with the series. Additional thanks to Kerosene Jones and Vuk Vuković.

Be sure to like and subscribe to the podcast so you can keep up to date with new episodes in the series. Follow us on Instagram at @Barbara_London_Calling and check out barbaralondon.net for transcripts of each episode and links to the works discussed.

This conversation was recorded on November 4, 2024; it has been edited for length and clarity.