The Enjoy Jazz art poster 2024 was created by María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Festival director Rainer Kern met the multidisciplinary Cuban-American artist while working at Harvard University on a project with professor Doris Sommer and was immediately impressed by the powerful yet highly poetic quality of her work.
Campos-Pons completed the majority of her academic training at the renowned Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana, which is also regarded as a kind of elite school for Cuban jazz. Harold Lopez-Nussa, Omar Sosa and Roberto Fonseca, who are well known to the Enjoy Jazz audience, were trained there. And five-time Grammy winner Chucho Valdes, who holds an honorary doctorate from the Berklee School of Music, is a professor at the ISA and head of the piano department, which has left its mark on jazz stages around the world. The artist herself also has a strong connection to music in her work. Over a period of around 20 years, she has developed almost 40 audiovisual works with the American sound artist and saxophonist Neil Leonard, Artistic Director of the Interdisciplinary Arts Institute at Berklee College of Music. She is currently working with the producer, songwriter and former "Arrested Development" bassist Kamaal Malak.
Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons then moved to the USA, where she completed her studies at the Massachusetts College for Art and Design in Boston and finally graduated with a master's degree in painting and media art. America was to remain the center of her life from then on. She initially taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston before accepting a professorship (Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair of Fine Arts) at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, one of America's leading research universities, in 2017.
Today, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons is considered one of the most important artists from post-revolutionary Cuba. Her work encompasses numerous artistic fields, including photography, painting, sculpture, video and media art, installation and performance, often in conjunction with the medium of language. She has had major solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Indianapolis Museum of Arts and the Brooklyn Museum, among others, and has twice participated in the Biennale di Venezia. In Germany, her works were shown as part of documenta 14 in 2017 and at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, among others.
Campos-Pons has received numerous important awards in the fields of art and social commitment, including the MacArthur Fellowship in 2023, also known as the American "genius award". In her art, she follows a deeply humanistic narrative that oscillates between naming and balancing. One of the central themes of her work, which she repeatedly links with mythologies, traditions and symbols from the communities of the African diaspora, is the reappraisal of her own family history. The African branch of this multi-ethnic artist's family worked under inhumane conditions as slaves on the sugar cane plantations and the Chinese branch had to work in debt bondage conditions in the sugar factories. Against this background, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons repeatedly refers to the themes of colonization, forced migration and enslavement or inhumane working conditions, especially in her Cuban homeland. She also frequently reflects on the myths of the West African ethnic group of the Yoruba and the Afro-Cuban Santeria religion. She has also received international attention and recognition for her work on feminism, female sexuality and the position of women in society and art.
The modernity of Campos-Pons' works is often based on traditional, timeless myths, which she condenses in an alchemical-like process, making them synaesthetically tangible in an almost magical way. Her art does not need to be "understood" in order to be effective. It works and is understood as a result.
The Cuban-American artist is connected in many ways with this year's Enjoy Jazz festival motto: Healing. In the wake of the nationwide protests triggered by racially motivated attacks, she conceived the art and discussion series "Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice" in 2020, which "focuses on healing in a time of significant social unrest". Campos-Pons explained: "Throughout history, art has always served as a vehicle for social change", combined with the hope of "promoting positive values of inclusivity that respect the suffering and struggle of our ancestors while inspiring dialog and understanding." Because, and this is certainly one of the key sentences for the work of this great artist: "We are many things at once."

Date: September 18, 2024