María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Art, has been named the 2024 SEC Faculty Achievement Award winner from Vanderbilt University. Her artistic work spans a variety of media, including photography, performance, sculpture, drawing, painting and video. She employs them in immersive installations that explore her experience as a Cuban woman and the broader issues facing Caribbean people, including displacement and inequality.
“Professor Campos-Pons is celebrated worldwide for her multifaceted artistic works, and she is admired on campus for her immense talent, endless creativity and incredible generosity toward other artists,” said Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs C. Cybele Raver. “I am proud to have her represent Vanderbilt as our SEC Faculty Achievement Award winner.”
This accolade is the latest in a string of recent achievements for Campos-Pons. In September 2023, her first survey in more than a decade opened at the Brooklyn Museum. Co-organized by the Paul J. Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Behold includes Campos-Pons’ art over four decades while exploring themes such as migration, diaspora, memory, enslavement and motherhood. The exhibition will open at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville this fall.
In October 2023, Campos-Pons was named a MacArthur Fellow. Also known as a “genius grant,” the MacArthur fellowship awards an $800,000 “no strings attached” stipend to its recipients. This winter, she traveled to the Middle East to conduct research, promote Vanderbilt and exhibit her work, including at Saudi Arabia’s Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale. Campos-Pons also spent time in the United Arab Emirates, attending the launch of the inaugural Toni Morrison Fellowship at the Africa Institute in Sharjah.
Campos-Pons is the founder and director of the Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice, an ongoing collaboration of Vanderbilt, Fisk University, the Frist Art Museum and Millions of Conversations that explores creative approaches to resisting and repairing inequality in the U.S. and global South. Spring 2024 programming includes film screenings, lunch and learns, a public art installation at Fisk University and an exhibition opening for Jose Luis Benavides, Vanderbilt lecturer of art, at Begonia Labs on West End Avenue.
“Magda could not be more deserving of this recognition,” said Timothy P. McNamara, interim dean of the College of Arts and Science. “She continues to make an enormous impact on her students, the Vanderbilt community and the art world broadly with her groundbreaking creative expression and her dedication to art education, innovation and service.”
Campos-Pons holds degrees from the National School of Art, Havana; the Higher Institute of Art, Havana; and the Massachusetts College of Art. Before joining Vanderbilt in 2017, she was a professor at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her works are in more than 50 museum collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Pérez Art Museum in Miami. She also was the 2021 recipient of the prestigious Pérez Prize.