The Women's Work Issue Women's Work. Pen and Brush. 2019 | Page 28

pen + brush x of note THROUGH THIS FIGURE, WE SEE CAMPOS-PONS’S TANGLED GENEALOGY BETWEEN WOMEN — ­SISTERS, MOTHERS, GRANDMOTHERS — ­AS UMBILICAL. IT IS A TANGLE OF BRAIDS, OF DREADLOCKS, OF THREADS, AND STRANDS KNOTTED, ALL FAMILIAR MOTIFS OF HER WORK. Communist Cuba when religion was strictly Arches archival paper. Through this figure, we see Campos-Pons’s tangled genealogy between prohibited though practiced behind closed women — ­ sisters, mothers, grandmothers — ­ a s doors. Race equality was declared by the Cuban state and yet African heritage and umbilical. It is a tangle of braids, of dreadlocks, cultural practice was clearly denigrated and of threads, and strands knotted, all familiar devalued. motifs of her work. In her naming of the work, the artist employs the dual language of “Angel’s Trumpets,” for which its known in Cuba and also labels them as the “Devil’s Bells.” Framing the flower as having the power for good or for evil is a matter of orientation and intent for Campos-Pons who hears the music of both instruments. Indeed, the campana conjures a childhood of contradictions for Campos- Pons. Her father was a farmer for most of his life and would collect herbs from the forest El Monte, signifying the centrality of Yoruba cosmologies for the Campos-Pons family even though these rites were not always publicly acknowledged. Though she and her parents were not initiated into Lucumi, one of Campos-Pons’s grandmothers, who she never met, had been a Santería priestess. One of her great grandmothers migrated from Canton, China to Cuba and labored in sugar mills. Campos-Pons also discovered her childhood home in Matanzas was the former sugar plantation barracks that housed enslaved people, including one of her great grandfathers. Campos-Pons came of age in 24 The nine panels of Angel’s Trumpets, Devil’s Bells are a familiar geometry or grid-like ordering of space in Campos-Pons’s work, signifying separation, segmentation, exile, and cohesion as the poetics of the diasporic condition. One panel features shredded pieces of United States’ Transportation Security Administration (TSA) tape. The government is torn. But it is also salvaged, displayed, and archived. These objects that symbolize the crossing of borders reflect another recurring theme in Campos- Pons’s work—that of longing, of waiting, of the liminal space of migration. She often speaks of her own migration experience of disruption and the impact of embargos in spaces such as airports. In tandem, the border emerges as a space of red tape, bureaucracy, biometrics surveillance, and rupture. Yet it is also a space of becoming—emergency and emergence—for the artist who just last year was naturalized as a U.S. citizen. María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Angel’s Trumpets, Devil’s Bells, 2019. Mixed media on Arches archival paper, 9 panels, 40 x 26 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Women’s Work 25