1,000 Words

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Art, was awarded a 2023 MacArthur Fellowship in October from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The fellowships are $800,000 that is distributed over five years.

A multidisciplinary artist from Cuba, Campos-Pons creates installations that showcase her personal experiences as a Cuban woman as well as document displacement and inequality in the Caribbean. Her work has been shown around the world, including a recent retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City.

"Cuba is a place of a lot of melding cultures," Campos-Pons told the MacArthur Foundation. "I found that America, too, is a place of melding identities.

"If somebody encountered my work for the first time-may they pause for a minute and try to have an understanding of what it is," she said. "It could be surprise. It could be beauty. It could be discomfort. But all of that would be an experience of new understanding, an expansive view of a reality."