Artists

María Magdalena Campos-Pons (b. 1959, Matanzas) emigrated to the United States in 1991. She grew up on a sugar plantation in a family with Nigerian, Hispanic, and Chinese roots in the province of Matanzas, Cuba. Her polyglot heritage profoundly influences Campos-Pons’ interdisciplinary artistic practice, spanning photography, performance, painting, sculpture, film, and video. Campos-Pons graduated from the National School of Art in 1979 and the Higher Institute of Art in 1985, both in Havana. She earned her MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1988. By the late 1980s, she gained international recognition as part of the emerging New Cuban Art movement. 

Campos-Pons has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada, among many other prominent organizations. She has presented over thirty performances in institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. She has participated in the Dakar Biennale, the Johannesburg Biennial, the Guangzhou Triennial, the Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, Prospect.4 Triennial, the Venice Biennale, Documenta 14, and the Havana Biennial. Her works are included in several museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Among the numerous fellowships, prizes, and honors she has received are the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University in 2017 and the Pérez Prize in 2021.

Photo courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum

Coco Fusco (b. 1960, New York) is a Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and professor based in New York. She received her B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University (1982), her M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1985) and her Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University (2007). Fusco is a recipient of a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award, a 2021 Latinx Artist Fellowship, a 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, a 2016 Greenfield Prize, a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts.

Fusco's performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008 and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. She is the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015), English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995), The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003).

Photo by Geandy Pavon

Marta María Pérez Bravo (b. 1959, Havana) is a Mexican-based artist whose work in photography and video explores Spiritism, Christianism, and African-Cuban religions of Santería and Palo Monte from the lens of gender. Her art engages with the themes of ritual, motherhood, and femininity, expressed by visual compositions where her body is portraited along with personally and ritually meaningful objects. She is considered one of the pioneers of contemporary Cuban photography.

Pérez Bravo graduated from the National School of Arts “San Alejandro” (1979), and from the Higher Arts Institute (1984), both in Havana. Although she studied painting, her practice on photography has defined her creative career since the mid-1980s. She has received numerous recognitions such as the Guggenheim Fellowship (1998) and Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) lifetime Achievement Award (2012). Her work has been included in many international exhibitions and biennials, such as Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, the Havana Biennial, 21st Bienal de São Paulo in Brazil, 5th Istanbul Biennial, and the Kwangju Biennale in South Korea. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana; Pori Art Museum, Finland; Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and Museo Español e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo, Badajoz, Spain; among other preeminent institutions.

Photo Courtesy of the artist

Gertrudis Rivalta (b. 1971, Santa Clara) is a multi-disciplinary artist, living between Cuba and Spain, whose trajectory includes drawing, sculpture, painting, photography, video, and performance. A graduate of the Higher Art Institute in Havana in 1996, Rivalta has exhibited her work in some of the most distinguished Cuban art galleries and museums, such as Centro Wifredo Lam, Fototeca of Cuba, National Museum of Fine Arts, Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, as well as in international spaces such as Museo de Arte de Ponce, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Ibero-American Museum of Contemporary Art, Track 16 Gallery (LA, California), Gallery Adhoc (Vigo, Spain), and Espace Croix-Baragnon (Toulouse, France). Among her most acclaimed solo shows is Evans or not Evans (1998, University of Alicante) that revisited the work of the US American photographer Walker Evans in Cuba. Her work formed part of the 1997 group show Queloides, the first-ever exhibition in Cuba focusing on race and the place that Black people occupy in Cuban society. She participated in the Biennial of São Paulo-Valencia (2008) curated by Ticio Escobar and Kevin Power.  Her work is held in collections in Cuba, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. She is a 2022 Hemispheric Institute Mellon Fellow in Residence.

Photo Courtesy of the artist

Juana Valdés (b. 1963, Pinar del Río) is a multi-disciplinary artist and professor. She came to the United States at the age of eight in 1971. Valdes completed her MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in 1993 and her BFA in Sculpture at Parsons School of Design in 1991. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 1995. Recent solo exhibitions include: Rest Ashore, Locust Projects, Miami, FL, (2020) Terrestrial Bodies, Cuban Legacy Gallery, Miami Dade College Special Collections, Freedom Tower (2019-2020); An Inherent View of the World, Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami (2017); and From Island to Ocean: Caribbean and Pacific Dialogues, Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University, NJ (2015). Her exhibition An Inherent View of the World was acquired in full by the Pérez Art Museum, Miami.

Valdés’ work has been included in several group exhibitions in biennials, museums and university galleries such as: Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, Site Santa Fe, Pérez Art Museum, El Museo del Barrio, MOMA PS1, MOCA, North Miami; Galerie Verein Berliner Künstler, Berlin; the Mason Gross Galleries at Rutgers University, NJ; Newark Museum, NJ; Galerie Binnen, Amsterdam; and FreeSpace, Sydney. Grants, Awards and Fellowships include: Anonymous Was A Woman (2020) Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2018), The Ellies Creator Award (2018); The Netherland-American Foundation Cultural Grant, (2011); New York Foundation for the Arts, Sculpture/Craft (2011); the National Association of Latinos Arts and Culture Visual Artists Grant (2009); and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (1998).

Photo by Pedro Wazzan.