Last week to see "Here We Are"

"Aqui Estamos" (Here We Are) closes on November 30 at H&F Fine Arts just over the DC street border at H&F Fine Arts, which by the way is quite a really beautiful gallery space and clearly a lot of work from the co-owners Karen Handy and Cheryl Fountain and easily the key arts presence on the rising Gateway Arts District.

On the walls are drawings, photographs, paintings and etchings by some of the most important contemporary Cuban artists on the planet today as well as a couple of emerging ones; work by Magdalena Campos-Pons, Kcho, Sandra Ramos, Cirenaica Moreira, Marta Maria Perez Bravo, Aimee Garcia Marrero and Roberto Acosta Wong.

Kevin Mellema just reviewed the show and you can read his insightful review here.

I have mentioned before the coup of this show has been in bringing to the Greater DC area for the first time work by Kcho and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, and I will admit that I have been a tiny bit puzzled that this fact has not received a little more attention; it's not everyday that the focus of an exhibition, even a Cuban art exhibition, includes work by Afro-Cubans, with their unique perspective on art given to them by their experiences with both the African and Cuban diasporas.

Take the case of Campos-Pons.

She has been called "one of Boston’s most prominent artists," and as evidence it has been submitted that this exceptional Cuban-born (and now American by citizenship) artist has shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (where she had a solo before age 30), Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, the Venice Biennale, and many other prestigious venues around the world.

And last year the Indianapolis Museum of Art hosted “Everything Is Separated by Water,” a mid-career retrospective of Campos-Pons' paintings, sculptures, photos, and installations.


When I was trying to arrange her participation in this show (and the follow on in Philadelphia) I visited Magda, as she is usually called, and we met in her four year old gallery, Gasp, which she and her husband opened in 2004 -- and which according to the Boston press "specializes in group shows of young experimenting artists and stars from the international art circuit that her own stature attracts. It’s one of a handful of galleries in town that aren’t primarily commercial or institutional."

"Te pareces a uno de mis primos (you look like one of my cousins)," she told me with a huge smile as we met; the smile would rarely leave her face during the three plus hours that I spent talking with this dynamo of a woman.

Campos-Pons was born in La Vega, in the province of Matanzas, Cuba, a sugar plantation town where her Nigerian-born great-great grandfather worked as a slave in Cuba's brutal slave system, in which sugar mill owners often owned thousands of slaves and where death and rape were common parts of life.

In Spanish, Matanzas means "Slaughter" or "Killings" -- imagine a US state or a Canadian province named "Slaughters" as a reminder of the brutality of the Spaniards' treatment of the native Indians (within a couple of decades of the Europeans arrival in Cuba, nearly the entire native Indian population had been wiped out by disease, murder and suice). The name "Matanzas" commemorates the actual suicide deaths of tens of thousands of Taino Indians who committed suicide rather than become slaves to their white masters from Spain as Kubanacan (as Cuba was known in the native Taino language) became a colony of the mighty Kingdom of Spain as the world entered the so called "Spanish Century", mostly on the back of the red and black races.

When Cuba's native population died out from suicide or disease, the Conquistadores began the new continent's slave trade and brought in African slaves purchased from the Arabs, and mostly on the brutal labor of their backbones, a new Cuban nation was forged eventually.

And as an Afro-Cuban woman with this history in her blood lines, Campos-Pons has used her cultural and racial background the initial key theme of her own work, with long ties to her Cuban homeland, but also with a powerful influence of her evolving Americanosity.

We talked about Cuba, about her background there, her family, her education in the Cuban system, her growing disappointment with the intolerant and repressive Castro regime, her trials and tribulations in leaving the land that she loves so much, her marriage to the talented American musician Neil Leonard, the struggle to get a legal visa to the US - during which she lived for a year and a half in Canada on art fellowships with her husband visiting her on weekends, before she was allowed to immigrate to the US at the end of 1991.

We switched between machine-gun Cuban Spanish ("Cubans use Spanish as a weapon," a South American friend once told me) and English, as she described her gallery, which she is heroically building one room and idea at a time. I was amazed by a wide-planked wood floor that Magda constructed herself, the doorway that she cut through the wall, the translucent plastic materials that she uses very elegantly to cover up and separate areas and to create a resident artist's studio, and the new expansive room that she is now building. "This gallery is an art installation in progress," I thought to myself.

We discussed her then current show at the gallery, Are We There Yet? - curated by Dawoud Bey. It featured work by Howard Henry Chen, Alan Cohen, Christine DiThomas, Aron Gent, Rula Halawani, Surendra Lawoti, Curtis Mann, Oscar Palacio and Adriana Rios. I was particularly impressed by the work of Curtis Mann and Christine DiThomas. Mann's compositional abilities and a very effective technique of distressing paper in order to acquire a good ground for the piece, really yields very memorable imagery, while DiThomas' photographs transcend the focus of the show and float - aided considerably by the very elegant presentation and soft focus - a sense of time and place; they can be "modernized" images from the 50s, 60s or even colonial America.

Magda was enthusiastic and energizing in describing the show and the artists, and relating - from one gallerist to another now - the struggles and successes of running an independent art gallery: dealing with landlords, helping the emerging Brookline neighborhood establish a separate but individual identity rather than become another cookie-cutter gentrified neighborhood, etc.

She is a hurricane in action, one moment telling me about her plans to talk to a friend restauranteur into opening an Iranian food cafe that would feature artwork; the next moment talking about forging friendships with the new small businesses that have opened since they opened Gasp.

In the middle of this, a smiling Chinese lady pops into the gallery. "I just cooked these and wanted to give you some," she tells Magda as she hands her a bag full of noodles. She is the owner of a tiny new Chinese restaurant down the block. It is the perfect exclamation point to our conversation.

I've been there for over two hours and I still have not talked about her own work, but I have been hypnotized into talking for hours about Cuba, the gallery business, art, race, immigration, the press, Cuban food, cooking, her neighborhood, Boston, and even issues dealing with the plight of illegal aliens.

Her 15-year-old son Arcadio walks in, already half a foot taller than either one of us; it is time for Magda to check his homework assignment. They disappear for a while in the back of the gallery while she checks his laptop report. Later on I find out that Arcadio's homework assignment is in fact assigned by his parents in exchange for computer gaming time. The assignment? ... To write four gallery or museum reviews a month. "He is really developing into a very good writer and critic," the proud mother tells me.



We digress into a discussion about children and she laughs as she tells me about the surreal experiences of being a Cuban black woman in the wee hours of the morning taking her very Bostonian child to hockey practice in a freezing ice arena and also relates Arcadio's visits to Cuba and how well he fit into the Cuban world of La Vega.

"Probably the first grandson of La Vega to play hockey," I think silently.

My wife calls and wants to know if she can run from the downtown hotel to the gallery and meet us. Magda, who also runs regularly, changes gears and gives her directions and is amazed when my wife shows up forty minutes later. "You ran from Copley to here already?" she asks amazed.

My wife was once ranked fifth in the world in the triathlon and repesented the United States twice at the world competitions of the event. She was twice the Maryland state champion during her competing days.

We start the gallery tour all over again - this is a gallerist possessed by love for her art and love for her gallery and the opportunity that it affords to the artists that she show. "We have a different model," she tells us. "We have a curated show each month," she explains, "with a thematic exhibition by several artists as well as a show by a new, emerging artist in the back room."

We walk upstairs to her studio, on the way up she apologizes about the mess that we're to expect. "All artists do this," I think to myself. I have never been to a neat artist studio, and hopefully I never will.

She immediately begins to root around for things and artwork and post-cards and books and memories. "I never throw anything away," she warns us as she dances around the crowded two rooms that make up her studio space. The walls are packed with both work by other artists, really advanced work by her son, and works in progress by Campos-Pons.

Like most Cuban artists, Magda is highly trained in nearly every facet of the fine arts: she is a printmaker, a painter, a sculptor, a videographer, a photographer and even a glass artist.

Over the years her photographic work has been a prominent member of the leading visual imagery of contemporary art; the one below (of Magda and her mother) once graced the cover page of the New York Times' art section and is currently in the collection of the Brooklyn Art Museum ...



As most artists who dance at the top of the art world know, it is a hard dance, and continuing exploration of what fuels the fire of being an artist becomes an essential part of continuing success.


Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons: Everything Is Separated by Water (Indianapolis Museum of Art) (Hardcover) by Okwui Enwezor (Author), Lisa D. Freiman (Editor). Order the book here
We begin discussing her latest works and Magda dissolves and melts in front of my eyes, and reforms herself into a fountain spewing multiple jets of information at once.

There's something unique about this talented artist - she's the Cuban art world's Pocahantas to the New Yorkish John Smith art universe. Through her and her work, Cuba's bloody African entrails are exposed, perhaps to the chagrin of Miami's powerful and nearly all white Cuban-American population. Like Pocahantas, she learned English harshly and quickly, and also like Pocahantas, she learned to adapt as needed and become a new entity in an almost colorless new world.

Through her and her art, first Bostonians and then the art universe was given a high dose of Cuban art education, and within that art world even African-Americans were also initiated: "you are not the only ones, my Northern brothers and sisters," her artwork shouts to the four corners of America.

It is all a good thing for art, because the most important achievement that her artwork has caused is to deliver Campos-Pons from precisely all those boxes and labels that we are all so fond of trying to pin on artists.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Island Treasures. Large Format Polaroids - Currently hanging at H&F Fine Arts
In a very strong sense, her artwork and her worldwide success has liberated her from labels, and while her Cubanosity has certainly fueled her artistic personna and productivity, it is her talent and work ethic as an artist that now has her as just a brilliantly talented artist simply producing great art.

Art.