Round midday on Saturday, September 7, I discovered myself in a nondescript classroom at El Museo del Barrio giddily singing Pleased Birthday to Oshun and Yemayá, two orishas of the Yoruba faith, earlier than a pair of towering truffles generously iced of 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 strolling efficiency this month by which she leads artists, musicians, and members of the general public to websites throughout Manhattan that maintain particular that means for Black, Cuban, and Cuban-American New Yorkers. Beginning shiny and early at Harlem Artwork Park on East one hundred and twentieth Road, we made our method downtown to the “Dos Alas” mural on a hundred and fifth, after which westward to El Museo, a phalanx of white, blue, and yellow (per the artist’s request) beneath clear rain ponchos.
Nearly precisely a yr in the past, Campos-Pons and a bunch of performers wearing an similar palette and crammed the atrium of the Brooklyn Museum for “A Mom’s River of Tears,” a chunk that drew upon Yoruba therapeutic practices and ancestral rituals to commemorate Black people killed by racist violence. It concerned lots of the similar themes as “Procession of Angels,” entwining motion, sound, and sensorial parts to arouse a catharsis of sorrow and pleasure. However the cavernous acoustics of the museum’s Beaux-Arts Court docket, and a format that restricted viewers engagement, inhibited the work’s potential. In contrast, the latest efficiency in East Harlem, a collaboration with the Madison Sq. Park Conservancy, captured the essence of Campos-Pons’s follow. Her excellence as an artist lies in making room for others; in harnessing the collective towards a unified imaginative and prescient that conjures up exaltation.
As lazy grey clouds settled above us at Harlem Artwork Park, the rhythms of Afro-Cuban vocal and drum ensemble Belongó shook any remnants of sleep from our our bodies. Performers danced within the heart of the circle that fashioned round 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 affection and fertility. (These figures reappear all through Campos-Pons’s oeuvre partly as a result of her paternal grandmother, a Santería priestess, assigned them because the artist’s guardian orisha deities days after her start.)
In an tackle to the gang, she shared a reminiscence of breaking down into tears when she noticed the Sistine Chapel for the primary time. Simply because the chapel was Michelangelo’s studio, she mentioned, “I invite you to make the streets of East Harlem yours.”
“I’m not evaluating myself to Michelangelo, and also you don’t must cry,” she clarified.
After a ceremony that included poems by Ricardo Blanco, roughly 120 of us started the pilgrimage to our first cease, first gingerly and shortly with the buoyant confidence wanted to skirt pedestrians and cease site visitors within the stirring metropolis morning. Quickly we have been standing earlier than 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 identical fowl.”
Albizu Campos was the chief of the Puerto Rican independence motion; Guevara the ever present face of the Cuban Revolution, remembered as an anti-capitalist hero by some and a cold-blooded killer by others. Painted in 1997 by largely Puerto Rican artists preventing towards gentrification in El Barrio, the mural “stood untouched till a number of years in the past, when individuals who determined they didn’t like Che Guevara started vandalizing it,” Nuyorican documentarian and poet Marina Ortiz instructed us. “And annually we come and restore it.”
Campos-Pons was raised within the Cuban province of Matanzas. She was born in 1959, the yr of Fidel Castro’s rise to energy, within the former barracks of the sugar plantation the place her Nigerian great-grandfather was enslaved. Constrained by the repression of creative freedom on the island, she skilled different limitations as soon as she relocated to the US, the place a strict journey and commerce embargo stored her remoted from her household. This sense of “self-exile,” writes Carmen Hermo, who curated the exhibition on the Brooklyn Museum final yr, in that present’s catalogue, evidently influenced the artist’s perspective — one already sophisticated by her ancestral ties to colonial violence.
These lived experiences enable Campos-Pons to interact with arguably divisive symbols, like “Dos Alas,” throughout the lexicon of a particular neighborhood. Not like the dérive of the Situationists, who proposed the creative gesture of strolling by means of a metropolis with out intentionality, her steps are firmly rooted in function and locality.
The fragrance of contemporary basil wafted from bouquets held by white-robed performers and mingled with the city scent of automobile exhaust as we made our technique to our ultimate vacation spot, El Museo del Barrio. Exterior the museum, a younger and promising poet, 10-year-old Kayden Hern, delivered a shifting studying impressed by his private expertise as a Black boy from Harlem in a public schooling system that doesn’t count on him to succeed. His grandmother, within the entrance row, beamed with pleasure. Then we stepped inside for an art-making workshop the place I coloured a paper butterfly with Hern and helped slice cake, buzzing with a craving for the world that I’ve now come to acknowledge because the Campos-Pons impact.
“What are they protesting now?” I heard a bunch of males asking in Spanish exterior the Fantastic Fare Mart on Third Avenue and 104th Road. For “Procession of Angels,” contributors have been requested to hold indicators depicting easy phrases equivalent to “unity” and “gratitude” in English and Arabic and illustrations despatched in for the efficiency by artists around the globe. It’s not unusual to come across the language of affection, care, and therapeutic in museum press releases and exhibition essays today; on this context the phrases can sound drained and empty. Uttered by Campos-Pons and printed on our placards, although, they rang with authenticity, maybe as a result of the artist doesn’t sofa these concepts within the type of institutional verbiage that means a hidden agenda. There isn’t a concealment, no subterfuge — simply the nice and cozy drizzle of late summer season rain and the consolation of strolling collectively.
The second “Procession of Angels,” a performance-walk by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, will happen on Friday, September 20 from 9am to 2pm, starting with the Monument to José Julián Martí and ending with a efficiency at Madison Sq. Park.
