PUBLIC PANEL DISCUSSION:
Women in the Arts: Leading the Way Towards Inclusion
María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Carmen Hermo, Deborah Kass, and Jasmine Wahi
Moderated by Sarah Gavlak
Join us for an engaging conversation about the landscape and representation of women in the art world and the role of artists and curators in making the cultural sector a more inclusive and equitable place.
Click here to watch the recorded panel discussion.
Click here for the reading list compiled by panelists.
PARTICIPANT BIOS:
María Magdalena Campos-Pons: María Magdalena Campos-Pons (b. 1959, province of Matanzas, in the town of La Vega, Cuba) grew up on a sugar plantation in a family with Nigerian, Hispanic and Chinese roots. Her Nigerian ancestors were brought to Cuba as slaves in the 19th century and passed on traditions, rituals, and beliefs. Her polyglot heritage profoundly influences Campos-Pons’ artistic practice, which combines diverse media including photography, performance, painting, sculpture, film, and video.
Her work is autobiographical, investigating themes of history, memory, gender and religion and how they inform identity. Through deeply poetic and haunting imagery, Campos-Pons evokes stories of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, indigo, and sugar plantations, Catholic and Santeria religious practices, and revolutionary uprisings. In the late 1980s, Campos-Pons taught at the prestigious Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana and gained an international reputation as an exponent of the New Cuban Art movement that arose in opposition to Communist repression on the island. In 1991, she emigrated to Boston, where she lived until 2017 when she was awarded the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Campos-Pons has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the National Gallery of Canada, among other distinguished institutions. She has presented over 30 solo performances commissioned by institutions including the Guggenheim and The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. She has participated in the Venice Biennale, the Dakar Biennale, Johannesburg Biennial, Documenta 14, the Guangzhou Triennial, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA and Prospect.4 Triennial. Campos-Pons’ works are in over 30 museum collections including the Smithsonian Institution, The Whitney, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Canada, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Perez Art Museum, Miami and the Fogg Art Museum.
Carmen Hermo: Carmen Hermo is Associate Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum. She curated Roots of “The Dinner Party”: History in the Making, formed part of the Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall curatorial collective, and co-organized Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 and Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection, among other exhibitions.
Previously, Carmen was Assistant Curator for Collections at the Guggenheim Museum. Carmen received her B.A. in Art History and English from the University of Richmond and her M.A. in Art History from Hunter College.
Deborah Kass: Deborah Kass’s work examines the intersection of art history, popular culture, and the self. Her work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of Art, The Solomon Guggenheim Museum, The Jewish Museum, The Museum of Fine Art, Boston, The Cincinnati Museum, The New Orleans Museum, The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, Fogg/ Harvard Museum, as well as other museums and private collections.
Kass’s work has been shown nationally and internationally including at the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Biennale, and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. The Andy Warhol Museum presented "Deborah Kass, Before and Happily Ever After, Mid- Career Retrospective” in 2012, with a catalogue published by Rizzoli. Her monumental sculpture OY/YO became an instant icon and is now permanently installed in front of the Brooklyn Museum and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.
In 2018, Kass was inducted into The National Academy. In 2014, Kass was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame. She was honored with the Passionate Artist Award by the Neuberger Museum in 2016 and was the Cultural Honoree at the Jewish Museum in 2017. She serves on the boards of the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Jasmine Wahi : Jasmine Wahi is the Holly Block Social Justice Curator at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Founder + Co-Director of Project for Empty Space, a Newark, NJ based non profit organization that supports artists who are interested in social discourse and activism. Her practice predominantly focuses on issues of female empowerment, complicating binary structures within social discourses, and exploring multi-positional cultural identities through the lens of intersectional feminism. In 2019, Wahi joined the TED speaker family with her first TEDx talk on intersectionality and visibility, entitled All The Women In Me Are Tired. Wahi is a Visiting Core Critic at Yale University, and a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts. Jasmine Wahi received her Masters in Art History from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.