Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Photographer, 2007 Rappaport Prizewinner

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, an artist who uses a wide range of media to create works that trace her perspective as a Cuban exile, has won the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park's $25,000 Rappaport Prize.

Campos-Pons, 48, who lives in Brookline and is co-founder of Gasp, an art space there, is fresh off a major exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Her work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, among others. Her massive Polaroids, a multi-paneled creation showing the artist chained to her mother, were featured in a 2004 DeCordova exhibition, "Self Evidence: Identity in Contemporary Art."

As part of her prize, Campos-Pons will donate one of her works to the DeCordova.

"I don't know how to express it but I am overwhelmed," said Campos-Pons, who is known as Magda, in a phone interview. "It's beautiful to be acknowledged in a place that you have put so much time and energy. One of the things I value more is that it's a prize that is based in Boston."

This will be the second year in a row the Jerome Lyle Rappaport Prize, given out for the first time in 2000, went to a Cuban-born artist. The DeCordova awarded the prize to photographer Abelardo Morell last year.  Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, the DeCordova's director of curatorial affairs, said she's particularly impressed by the scope of the artist's work, which includes photography, sculpture, film, and multimedia performance.

"The story her art tells is not a complete narrative," said Rosenfield Lafo. "It's not a linear story, but she definitely, in her work, makes reference to her Nigerian heritage. Her ancestors were from Nigeria and came to Cuba through the slave trade. And then, as a young woman trying to expand her field, moving from Cuba to the United States, when, of course, she's displaced from the family once again. So I think part of that story is finding her identify as an Afro-Cuban artist in America."

As she reflected on her prize, Campos-Pons, who moved to Boston 17 years ago, thought back to her youth in Cuba. As a teenager, she took note that the National Museum in Cuba had only two female artists in its collection. Campos-Pons and her friends would debate which of them would be the next to produce work worthy of being added to the museum.

"My dreams, in some way, have come true," said Campos-Pons, noting that her work is now in the Cuban museum. "How can I make a little tiny story from this small place I come from? It's just marvelous and just so reaffirming to think about yes, you can be very humble, you can come from the very small family with very few means and really aim to be something and do something with your life."

Article from Geoff Edgers, Globe Staff | August 18, 2007

Classic Creole                                                                Replenishing, 2003
Composition of 15 Polaroids                                         Large format Polaroid
20" x 24"                                                                      60" x 72"