A career-spanning exhibition of works by María Magdalena Campos-Pons featuring photography, installation, video, painting, and performance opens September 27 in the Frist’s Ingram Gallery. Also, multidisciplinary artist Lajuné Mcmillian explores black freedom and movement through new digital media and performance in her exhibition opening that day at the Frist Art Museum.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold is a sweeping exhibition of photography, installation, video, painting, and performance spanning the nearly four-decade career of the Cuban-born artist who now lives and works in Nashville. The first survey of Campos-Pons’s work since 2007, Behold brings together career highlights and new works, along with a multimedia series on view for the first time in the United States. In more than 50 richly layered artworks, sketchbooks, and documented performances, the artist draws on her memories and experiences as well as her family’s story to examine the histories of enslavement, indentured labor, motherhood, migration, and race. The exhibition audio guide will feature Campos-Pons speaking about selected works.
“Campos-Pons is a witness, chronicler, and oracle, telling stories that are emotionally powerful and searingly honest,” writes Frist Art Museum chief curator Mark Scala. “Whether in expressions of family bonds and spiritual engagement or indictments of colonial history and its ongoing legacy of racism, they all point to the capacity of art to overcome hurt through the healing power of love.”
Born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1959, Campos-Pons incorporates Yoruba-derived Santería symbolism in her work but also references her experiences living in Boston, Italy, and Nashville, where she has been the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair Professor of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University since 2017. In 2011, the Frist organized an exhibition titled Journeys that featured Campos-Pons’s photography and multimedia works that explored aspects of the transatlantic slave trade broadly and her family’s particular history in the sugar industry.
Campos-Pons has made significant contributions to the larger art world and to Tennessee by founding and leading the Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice, a trans-institutional initiative between Vanderbilt, the Frist, Millions of Conversations, and Fisk University that brings scholars, critics, and artists from around the world together for artist interventions, exhibitions, seminars, and other programs. She launched the exhibition Intermittent Rivers in her hometown of Matanzas, Cuba, as part of the Havana Biennial, and served as the consulting curator for the 2023 Tennessee Triennial. In 2023, she was named a MacArthur Fellow in recognition of her groundbreaking synthesis of cultures and mediums in advocating for art’s capacity to heal individuals and society.
The Frist Art Museum also presents LaJuné McMillian: The Portal’s Keeper—Origins, an exhibition of multimedia projections, sculptural installations, and holographic self-portraits by the New York–based artist LaJuné McMillian, also through January 5, 2025. LaJuné McMillian uses 3D-modeling technology, motion-captured performances, and multisensory elements to create immersive, dynamic environments where they explore and celebrate Black bodily movement as an expression of liberation. With their use of motion-capture software, McMillian depicts Black dancers, performers, and the artist themself as avatars whose intense colors and exuberant bodies move within fantastic environments in response to poems, incantations, and an array of musical and extra-musical sounds.
“Throughout the works in this exhibition, the body—sinuous and vital, uninhibited and unencumbered—moves from a place of pain into one of new possibility,” writes Frist Art Museum chief curator Mark Scala. “In suggesting that technology can help Black people imagine a more empowered future for themselves, McMillian’s marvelous works explode the legacy of centuries in which the Black body was bound, constrained, abused, and exploited.”
