María Magdalena Campos-Pons leads a procession of hope

Around noon on Saturday, September 7, I found myself in an indescribable situation. classroom of the Museo del Barrio happily singing Happy Birthday to Oshun and Yemayá, two orishas of the Yoruba religion, in front of a pair of towering cakes generously iced in their respective hues of golden yellow and blue and white.

And so ended María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s first “Procession of Angels for Radical Love and Unity,” a two-part performance this month in which she takes artists, musicians, and audience members to Manhattan sites that hold special significance for black, Cuban, and Cuban-American New Yorkers. We set off early from Harlem Art Park on East 120th Street, then headed downtown to the “Dos Alas” mural on 105th Street, then west to El Museo, a phalanx of white, blue, and yellow (at the artist’s request) under sheer rain ponchos.

Almost exactly a year ago, Campos-Pons and a group of performers dressed in an identical palette and filled the Brooklyn Museum’s atrium for “A Mother’s River of Tears,” a piece that drew on Yoruba healing practices and ancestral rituals to commemorate Black people killed by racist violence. It featured many of the same themes as “Procession of Angels,” interweaving movement, sound, and sensory elements to elicit a catharsis of sadness and joy. But the cavernous acoustics of the museum’s Beaux-Arts Courtyard and a format that limited audience engagement, The work was inhibited by the artist’s desire to show her potential. In contrast, the recent performance in East Harlem, in collaboration with the Madison Square Park Conservancy, captured the essence of Campos-Pons’ practice. Her excellence as an artist lies in her ability to make space for others, to mobilize the collective toward a unified vision that inspires exhilaration.

As lazy gray clouds settled overhead at Harlem Art Park, the rhythms of the Afro-Cuban vocal and percussion ensemble Belongó shook our bodies from sleep. The performers danced in the center of the circle that formed around them, and Campos-Pons joined them with bouquets of mint leaves and sunflowers in honor of Yemayá, who presides over the oceans and waters, and Oshun, goddess of love and fertility. (These figures reappear throughout Campos-Pons’s work in part because her paternal grandmother, a Santería priestess, designated them as the artist’s guardian deities, orishas, ​​days after she was born.)

In her speech to the crowd, she described breaking down in tears when she first saw the Sistine Chapel. Just as the chapel was Michelangelo’s studio, she said, “I invite you to make the streets of East Harlem your own.”

“I’m not comparing myself to Michelangelo, and you don’t need to cry,” she said.

After a ceremony that included poems by Ricardo Blanco, about 120 of us headed to our first stop, cautiously at first, then with the confidence to dodge pedestrians and stop traffic on the city’s hectic morning. We soon found ourselves in front of the imposing mural “Dos Alas” (“Two Wings”), depicting Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Pedro Albizu Campos, named after Lola Rodríguez de Tió’s metaphor that Cuba and Puerto Rico are “two wings of the same bird.”

Albizu Campos was the leader of the Puerto Rican independence movement; Guevara was the ubiquitous face of the Cuban revolution, seen by some as an anti-capitalist hero and by others as a cold-blooded killer. Painted in 1997 by mostly Puerto Rican artists fighting the gentrification of El Barrio, the mural “sat there until a few years ago, when people who decided they didn’t like Che Guevara started vandalizing it,” Nuyorican documentarian and poet Marina Ortiz told us. “And every year we come and restore it.”

Campos-Pons grew up in the Cuban province of Matanzas. She was born in 1959, the year Fidel Castro came to power, in the former barracks of the sugar plantation where her Nigerian great-grandfather was enslaved. Constrained by the repression of artistic freedom on the island, she experienced further limitations when she moved to the United States, where a strict embargo on travel and trade kept her away from her family. This sense of “voluntary exile,” Carmen Hermo, who curated the show at the Brooklyn Museum last year, writes in the catalogue for this exhibition, clearly influenced the artist’s perspective, already complicated by her ancestral ties to colonial violence.

These lived experiences allow Campos-Pons to focus on discriminating symbols, such as “Dos Alas”, in the lexicon of a specific community. derive situationists, who proposed the artistic gesture of walking through a city without intention, one’s steps firmly anchored in a goal and a locality.

The scent of fresh basil wafted from the bouquets held by white-robed artists and mingled with the urban smell of car exhaust as we made our way to our final destination, El Museo del Barrio. Outside the museum, a promising young poet, 10-year-old Kayden Hern, gave a moving reading inspired by his personal experiences as a black boy from Harlem in a public education system that didn’t expect him to succeed. His grandmother, in the front row, beamed with pride. Then we went inside for an art workshop where I colored a paper butterfly with Hern and helped cut the cake, buzzing with a longing for the world that I’ve now come to recognize as the Campos-Pons effect.

“What are they protesting now?” I heard a group of men ask in Spanish outside the Fine Fare Mart on Third Avenue and 104th Street. For “Procession of Angels,” participants were required to carry signs depicting simple words like “unity” and “gratitude” in English and Arabic, along with artwork submitted for the performance by artists from around the world. It’s not uncommon to encounter the language of love, care, and healing in museum press releases and exhibition essays these days; in this context, they can seem tired and empty. Yet as Campos-Pons spoke them and printed on our signs, they rang with authenticity, perhaps because the artist doesn’t express these ideas in the kind of institutional verbiage that suggests a hidden agenda. There is no concealment, no subterfuge – just the warm drizzle of late summer and the comfort of walking together.

The second “Procession of the Angels,” a march-performance by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, will take place on Friday, September 20 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., beginning at the Monument to José Julián Martí and ending with a performance at Madison Square Park.