The Collection

María Magdalena Campos-Pons is a Cuban-born artist working across photography, painting, sculpture, video, performance, and installation. Raised in La Vega, a sugar plantation town near Matanzas, she grew up within a layered heritage of Yoruba, Chinese, and Hispanic ancestry — a lineage that forms the bedrock of her deeply autobiographical practice. She trained at Cuba's National School of Art and the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, before emigrating to the United States in 1991 and completing her MFA at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.

Her work draws on personal and collective histories to examine the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade, indentured labor, displacement, and migration, weaving these together with themes of spirituality, motherhood, and cultural resilience. Santería — the Afro-Cuban religious tradition practiced by her family — is a recurrent presence, grounding her imagery in ritual, memory, and ancestral connection. Known in part for her large-format Polaroid photographs, Campos-Pons constructs what she has described as historical narratives that illuminate the spirit of people and places, past and present.

Her work is held in over thirty major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), and the National Gallery of Canada. She has presented work at the Venice Biennale, documenta 14, the Havana Biennial, and the Guggenheim Museum, among many others. In 2023 she was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship and was the subject of a major traveling retrospective, Behold, organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum. She holds the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University.