By Gantt Center Staff

The Harvey B. Gantt Center is committed to presenting exhibitions which display the best of African-American art, culture and history.  The nine exhibits that were mounted during the Center’s inaugural year included the work of celebrated artists Radcliffe Bailey, Kevin Cole, David Driskell, Sam Gilliam, Juan Logan and Michael Platt, among others. The Center will begin its sophomore year with the extraordinary art of María Magdalena Compos-Pons.  The paintings, installations and sculptures that form the exhibit build upon a dialogue of culture, history, and identity.  The synergy between this presentation and the Gantt Center’s raison d’être is strong and boldly evident.  It may be one of the most important exhibitions the Gantt Center has mounted to-date.

As a woman, an expatriate, and a Cuban, Campos-Pons weaves together elements that address exile, longing and separation.  Her work has emerged from an early 1980s focus on painting and the discussion of Cuban mixed cultural heritage to incisive questioning, critique and insertion of the body in contemporary narratives of the present.  Because of the separation that many in today’s society feel — through homeland, language or culture — the appeal of her work is universal.

Campos-Pons has exhibited internationally since 1984 — when she won Honorable Mention at the XVIII Cagnes-sur-Mer Painting Competition in France — in solo shows at MoMA, the Venice Biennale 2001, Johannesburg Biennial, the First Liverpool Biennial, the Dak’ART Biennial in Senegal and the Guangzhou Triennial in China.

She will travel to Charlotte, North Carolina for a rare appearance to coincide with her new exhibition, What My Mother Told Me:  The Art of María Magdalena Campos-Pons at the Harvey B. Gantt Center. The Center will open the show to the public on Saturday, January 29, 2011.  Campos-Pons will discuss her work with local educators on January 27 and will greet guests at a private opening on January 28.