Identity Could be a Tragedy
Artist
María Magdalena Campos-Pons
(Cuban, born 1959)
Date1995-1996
Mediumlarge format Polaroids (6 panels)
Dimensionseach panel: 61 x 50.8 cm (24 x 20 in.)
ClassificationsPaintings
Credit LineEliza S. Paine Fund
Object number2003.4
Label TextIdentity—how people see you and define you—can translate into opportunity or disadvantage. Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, a Cuban expatriate of Nigerian ancestry who has lived in the U.S. since 1988, asks us to consider an extreme scenario, how Identity could be a tragedy. Purposely leaving a “trace of herself” (and her color) in her art over the years, here she faces the large-format Polaroid camera (and us) eyes shut, and confronts the threat of social invisibility. Her body is symbolic of the collective absence of the black body in the history of art and a fragile link to the imposed transparency experienced by her ancestors who came to Cuba in the 19th century as slaves. In the repetition of image and text, Campos-Pons is emphatic about offering herself—not someone else and not once but six times—as affirmation of her individual and physical presence, no matter how vulnerable.
"Us Them We": Campos-Pons’s sequential grid of self-portraits asks the viewer to consider the prospect and ramifications of moving toward and away from one’s identity. To create this work, she faced a large-format camera with her eyes closed while donning white face paint, a reference to Santería religious practices in her native Cuba. Each image is progressively overexposed until only a trace of her body and words remain. Campos-Pons’s progressive disappearance is symbolic of the historic absence of the Black body in the history of art. It also represents the artist’s fragile link to the identities of her enslaved Cuban ancestors, themselves victims of erasure at the hands of Anglo-European imperialism.On View
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