Valentina Di Liscia (Hyperallergic) reports on a recent performance in New York—the “Procession of Angels for Radical Love and Unity” (2024), led by Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons on September 7, 2024. Di Liscia writes, “With stops at sites of significance to Black and Cuban New Yorkers, the artist’s walking performance captures the essence of her practice: harnessing the collective toward a unified vision.”
Around noon on Saturday, September 7, I found myself in a nondescriptclassroom at El Museo del Barrio giddily singing Happy Birthday to Oshun and Yemayá, two orishas of the Yoruba religion, before a pair of towering cakes generously iced in their respective hues of yellow-gold and blue and white.
This was the conclusion of María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s first “Procession of Angels for Radical Love and Unity,” a two-part walking performance this month in which she leads artists, musicians, and members of the public to sites across Manhattan that hold special meaning for Black, Cuban, and Cuban-American New Yorkers. Starting bright and early at Harlem Art Park on East 120th Street, we made our way downtown to the “Dos Alas” mural on 105th, and then westward to El Museo, a phalanx of white, blue, and yellow (per the artist’s request) beneath transparent rain ponchos.
Almost exactly a year ago, Campos-Pons and a group of performers dressed in an identical palette and filled the atrium of the Brooklyn Museum for “A Mother’s River of Tears,” a piece that drew upon Yoruba healing practices and ancestral rituals to commemorate Black individuals killed by racist violence. It involved many of the same themes as “Procession of Angels,” entwining movement, sound, and sensorial elements to arouse a catharsis of sorrow and joy. But the cavernous acoustics of the museum’s Beaux-Arts Court, and a format that limited audience engagement,inhibited the work’s potential. By contrast, the recent performance in East Harlem, a collaboration with the Madison Square Park Conservancy, captured the essence of Campos-Pons’s practice. Her excellence as an artist lies in making room for others; in harnessing the collective toward a unified vision that inspires exaltation.
As lazy gray clouds settled above us at Harlem Art Park, the rhythms of Afro-Cuban vocal and drum ensemble Belongó shook any remnants of sleep from our bodies. Performers danced in the center of the circle that formed around them and Campos-Pons joined with bundles 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 oeuvre in part because her paternal grandmother, a Santería priestess, assigned them as the artist’s guardian orisha deities days after her birth.) [. . .]
After a ceremony that included poems by Ricardo Blanco, approximately 120 of us began the pilgrimage to our first stop, first gingerly and soon with the buoyant confidence needed to skirt pedestrians and stop traffic in the stirring city morning. Soon we were standing before the imposing “Dos Alas” (“Two Wings”) mural, portraying Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Pedro Albizu Campos, and named after Lola Rodríguez de Tió’s metaphor of Cuba and Puerto Rico as “two wings of the same bird.”
Albizu Campos was the leader of the Puerto Rican independence movement; Guevara the ubiquitous face of the Cuban Revolution, remembered as an anti-capitalist hero by some and a cold-blooded killer by others. Painted in 1997 by mostly Puerto Rican artists fighting against gentrification in El Barrio, the mural “stood untouched until a few years ago, when people who decided they didn’t like Che Guevara began vandalizing it,” Nuyorican documentarian and poet Marina Ortiz told us. “And each year we come and restore it.” [. . .]
Read full article at https://hyperallergic.com/950590/maria-magdalena-campos-pons-leads-a-procession-of-hope/091624
[Photo above by Argenis Apolinario, courtesy the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy: María Magdalena Campos-Pons leads “Procession of Angels for Radical Love and Unity” (2024) on September 7, 2024.]