LIVE (at the Guggenheim): María Magdalena Campos Pons, Carrie Mae Weems and Black Feminist Performance

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Performing “Habla La Madre” at the Guggenheim on April 27, 2014. Photo by Nikki A. Greene.

Nikki A. Greene | Assistant Professor of the Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora | Wellesley College

Panel: Performance as Portraiture

Wednesday, February 3, 2016, 9:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m.

The 104th College Art Association Conference, Washington, DC

Chairs: Dorothy Moss, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution & Jamie L. Smith, CONNERSMITH Gallery

Mariott Wardman Park Hotel, Wshington 1, Exhibition Level

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All photos by Nikki A. Greene

María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Carrie Mae Weems, originally from Cuba and the United States, respectively, have thrived internationally creating works of art that examine African diasporic identity using the physicality of their own bodies as process, subject, and object, literally and figuratively. On April 27, 2014, María Magdalena Campos-Pons processed through the lobby and onto the ramps leading to the second floor galleries of the Guggenheim Museum of New York, shouting incantations among hundreds of visitors, costumed in a startlingly white, hooped dress that mimicked the iconic Frank Lloyd Wright building. Eight female attendants and an Afro-Cuban band sang and played along. In celebration of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, the performance took place during Carrie Mae Weems LIVE: Past Tense/Future Perfect, a weekend of programs of artist talks, dance, music, and theater.

This paper will examine how Campos-Pons performance “Habla La Madre” offered on that Sunday afternoon her Afro-Cuban body as a site of/for “Africa” and “womanhood” in harmony with Weems—and in dissonance with the museum space—serving to complicate performance art as portraiture within the African Diaspora. Stuart Hall defined the circular relationship of people of African descent to the continent as they return physically, intellectually, and/or spiritually as having to do with “what Africa has become in the New World, what we have made of ‘Africa’: ‘Africa’ as we re-tell it through politics, memory and desire.” Campos-Pons’ insertion within the Guggenheim stands as an exemplary performative portrait of a black feminist artist that is at once present and absent, still and in motion, familiar and foreign, historical and contemporary. By engaging (and interrupting) an “Africa” that thrives vis-à-vis Cuba and the United States through the artist’s own metonymic presence—in the museum/as the museum—in concert with the self-portraits and performances by Carrie Mae Weems concurrently on exhibition, Campos-Pons distinctly reveals how the portrait of an African diasporic body acts as a site of difference, rupture, fantasy, and indeed, self, in ways not traditionally available in feminist art history.

For the full video of the performance, see Carrie Mae Weems LIVE: Performances – “Habla La Madre” | guggenheim.org