María Magdalena Campos-Pons is gradually becoming a fixture in US museums, with a 2023 Brooklyn Museum retrospective having done much to raise her profile. In her installations, sculptures, videos, and performances, she mulls diasporas and migrations, often focusing on the ways in which history is carried in one s body and how it registers the effects of the past in ways both painful and transcendent.
Among Campos-Pons s latest projects is something more unconventional: a group of bronze awards that were given to this year s winners of the ARTnews Awards. Campos-Pons, who won the 2024 ARTnews Award for Lifetime Achievement in recognition of her Brooklyn Museum show, embarked on the project with the help of Modern Art Foundry, a Queens-based shop that helped her realize her latest creations.
Her awards are based on a flower given to her by another artist in 1990: a night-blooming cereus, which reaches its most brilliant form around midnight rather than in direct sunlight. Living with the plant for those many years, waiting for the blossom get to happen was a lesson that inscribed in me such an admiration about almost a parallel to the journey of an artist, she told ARTnews.
You work, you work, you water your ideas, you take. You keep working. Just because the love of making it and if you’re passionate enough and consistent, you re going to see the blossom. Campos-Pons spoke of viewing the ARTnews Awards as offering similar inspiration, a means of growth for the winners.
This year, those winners are Claudia Alarcón & Silät for Emerging Artist, Wafaa Bilal for Established Artist, Ralph Lemon for Lifetime Achievement, Jack Whitten for Historical Artist, “Legacies: Asian American Art Movements” at 80WSE for Best Thematic Museum Show, and “Bowls, Boxes, Plates & Vessels” at Parker Gallery for Best Gallery Group Show. Hear Campos-Pons talk further about her ARTnews Awards in the video above.
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