CUBAN ARTIST RECEIVES the Mc ARTHUR 'GENIUS' AWARD

A few hours ago the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced the 20 winners of the 2023 MacArthur Scholarships awarded for the exceptional, intellectual, and artistic achievements of the awardees.

If an artist receives the news that he has received the McArthur award for his genius talents, he would at least be jumping on one foot. María Magdalena Campos-Pons has just been notified with this good news and has begun to run from room to room throughout her house, enveloped in a feeling of terror and jubilation.

“When I left the town of La Vega to go to art school [as a child], I was wearing pants and a blouse that my mother made for me with the fabric of a used mattress cover. The only thing I had was my luggage and a small piece of brown paper that had the address of where I was going. And he knew he was never going to return to town until he had a lot of good news to share. So now I'm going to return to La Vega, like a genius MacArthur," the artist told NPR News.

The very prestigious Mc Arthur award, given to people with exceptional careers in all fields, is endowed with the amount of 800 thousand dollars without commitment to a project or exhibition. McArthur believes that the award is given as an investment in the potential of “extraordinarily talented and creative individuals.”

Exactly a week ago we published the good news that Campos-Pons had inaugurated a monograph of her work in Brooklyn. María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold is her title and it was opened to the public on September 15.

It is no coincidence that Mary Magdalene mentions her native land when interviewed. Her work is greatly nourished by the experiences of her family as enslaved people in that region of Matanzas, sadly known for its sugarcane plantations during the time of colonial slavery in Cuba.

The work of María Magdalena, derived from her experience as an Afro-Cuban, woman, descendant of immigrants and an immigrant herself, bearers of a cosmogony and system of beliefs that can be seen in her works, contains a highly autobiographical character. Race, ethnicity, gender, religion, symbolic systems of representation shape an artistic discourse that, despite being powerful, is still poetic.

According to Forbes, “the majority of this year's winners are people of color, including seven individuals who are Black or African American, five Latinos, three who identify as Indigenous or Native American, and two Asians.”

Since 1981, when this very important award began to be awarded, 1,131 mega-talented people have received it. Along with María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Manuel Muñoz, Courtney Bryan, A. Park Williams, Amber Wutich, Rina Foygel Barber, Diana Greene Foster, Imani Perry, Linsey Marr, Lucy Hutyra, Jason D. Buenrostro, Andrea Armstrong received the award in 2023. , E. Tendayi Achiume, Dyani White Hawk, Patrick Makuakāne, Lester Mackey, Ada Limón, Carolin Lazard, Raven Chacon, and Ian Bassin.

Now, how does the Mc Arthur nomination work? Nominees for a MacArthur Fellowship are selected by invited external nominators, chosen from a wide range of fields and interests. Nominations are evaluated by an independent selection committee, made up of approximately a dozen leaders from the arts, sciences, humanities, and for-profit and nonprofit communities. The committee then recommends its selections to the president and board of directors of the MacArthur Foundation.