This exhibition brochure by guest curator Julia P. Herzberg describes several works included in A Town Portrait, with an eponymous installation and two photographic series, When I Am Not Here/Estoy allá (1996) and Abridor de caminos (1997). These works address the Cuban artist’s experiences of living in exile in the United States, mainly Magdalena Campos-Pons’s exploration of her roots, memories, and transcultural experiences. A Town Portrait (1994) is an installation that symbolically re-creates her Cuban hometown, La Vega, through visual narratives based on her family’s recollections. La Vega is reliant on the sugar industry, and her enslaved ancestors and current family members were involved in its economy during her lifetime. The installation contains four architectural elements: a doorway, a wall, a fountain, and a distillery tower, and three video projections titled Flowers, Water Images, and Rocking Chair. When I Am Not Here/Estoy allá comprises three Polaroid prints depicting the artist covered in brown and white makeup, with texts on her chest that reflect on her bicultural existence. Abridor de caminos comprises ten Polaroid prints that reflect on the Afro-Cuban Santeria religion. Overall, these works comment on tradition, survival, and creativity, and the artist’s negotiation of the spaces and temporalities she has inhabited.

Julia P. Herzberg is an art historian, independent curator, and Fulbright Senior Specialist living in New York. She completed her PhD in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, in 1998, with a dissertation on Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. She is a specialist of Latin American artists living in the United States, and has curated more than twenty-five exhibitions. Herzberg was a co-curator of The Decade Show (1990), held in New York at the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, the New Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and she was the curator of the official U.S. representation for the III Bienal Internacional de Pintura in Cuenca, Ecuador (1991). In addition to serving as a consulting curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York (1996–2001), she was a consulting curator for the 2003, 2006, and 2009 Bienales de La Habana, and she is a contributing and consulting editor for Arte al día Internacional. Herzberg has taught, lectured, and published extensively in the United States and abroad and received two J. William Fulbright Scholarship Board awards: one at the Pontificia Universidad Católica (2007) and another at the Universidad Diego Portales (2013), both in Santiago, Chile, and also served as a visiting professor at the Instituto de Arte, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile (2016).

María Magdalena Campos-Pons (b. 1959, La Vega, Cuba) is a contemporary artist working in diverse media including photography, performance, painting, sculpture, film, and video. She was raised on a Cuban sugar plantation in a family of Nigerian, Hispanic, and Chinese descent. Her enslaved ancestors passed on their beliefs and rituals, strongly influencing her work. Through poetic imagery, she references the histories of the transatlantic slave trade, sugar plantations, Catholic and Santeria spiritual practices, and revolutions and uprisings. Her work claims space for women’s issues and tells the stories of those who have been forgotten. In the late 1980s, she taught at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana and became well-known as a member of the New Cuban Art Movement that rose in opposition to Cuban Communist repression. She emigrated to Boston in 1991, where she remained until 2017, when she became the Chair at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. She has had many solo exhibitions including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA); Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

This exhibition took place at Lehman College Art Gallery, City University of New York, in the Bronx, from February 4 to May 16, 1998. It represented the first of the two-part series, History of People Who Were Not Heroes; simultaneously the series’ second part, Spoken Softly with Mama, curated by Sally Berger, was exhibited at MoMA from March 5 to May 26, 1998. This show was her fourth solo exhibition in New York, following previous exhibitions at SOHO 20 Gallery (1990), INTAR Gallery (1993), and the Caribbean Cultural Center (1997).