PHOTOGRAPHY NEWS
September 29, 2024 – August 3, 2025
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH)
Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography
Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography traces the evolution of photography in Cuba from the 1960s to the 2010s.
The exhibition looks at contemporary Cuban photography from its role in promoting the Cuban Revolution after Fidel Castro’s 1959 overthrow of the Batista government to engaging in social and political critique following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. In subsequent years, Cuban photographers created powerful personal expressions by exploring individual identity, the body and spirit, Afro-Cuban heritage, and the margins of society, all while navigating the changing prescriptions and proscriptions of official cultural policy.
Showcasing 100 images, Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography celebrates the Museum's acquisition of some 300 photographs from Chicago-based collectors Madeleine and Harvey Plonsker. Read more »
February 18, 2025 — May 4, 2025
The Calling (detail), 2003, María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Diptych of Polaroid Polacolor Pro photographs. Collection of Jonathan and Barbara Lee. Courtesy of and © María Magdalena Campos-Pons
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California
María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold
The J. Paul Getty Museum presents María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold, a compelling exhibition that weaves together the artist’s personal and familial narratives to explore global histories of enslavement, indentured labor, motherhood, and migration. Against this backdrop, Campos-Pons highlights connections—between individuals, communities, and their environments—offering a powerful meditation on resilience and identity.
Organized in collaboration with the Brooklyn Museum, Behold brings together more than 50 works, including large-scale photographic grids, immersive installations, video pieces, paintings, and performance art documentation. While Campos-Pons’s photographs and installations are well represented in collections across the East Coast and Europe, this marks the first multimedia survey of her work since 2007 and the first major opportunity for West Coast audiences to experience the full scope of her artistic vision.
Born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1959, María Magdalena Campos-Pons draws deeply from her Afro-Cuban and Chinese heritage, infusing her work with Yoruba-derived Santería symbolism to examine both historical and contemporary struggles. Her art reflects a life shaped by migration, spanning Cuba, Italy, Boston, and Nashville, where she currently resides and serves as the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair Professor of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University.
The exhibition is structured into six thematic sections, each emphasizing forms of connection. Throughout, Campos-Pons’s evocative figures, flora, and fauna invite viewers to engage with their surroundings in new ways. Her work urges us to look closely and critically—to behold our world and each other—offering a vision for healing and reconnection in times of fragmentation.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold is organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum. The exhibition is curated by Carmen Hermo, formerly Associate Curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, and now Lorraine and Alan Bressler Curator of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, alongside Dr. Mazie Harris, Associate Curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Major support for the exhibition is provided by Alicia Miñana and Rob Lovelace. Read more »
January 29, 2025 — April 19, 2025
Diego Waisman, Grow, from For I Shall Already Have Forgotten You, 2021, Color photograph, 22 x 33 inches, Purchased with Funds from the Dorothea Green Emerging Artists Fund, FIU 2024.9.2
Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami, Florida
Sunset Colonies
In a series of poignant and evocative images, Diego Alejandro Waisman: Sunset Colonies examines the vulnerabilities faced by residents of South Florida's mobile home communities amid rapid urban transformation and the persistent threat of economic displacement. Named after Waisman's book of the same title, the exhibition features photographs from the Frost Art Museum's collection alongside additional works by the artist, created over a span of seven years.
Set against the backdrop of the 2008 recession and real estate bubble, and the inflationary pressures following the COVID-19 pandemic, the photographs possess a unique ability to condense a multitude of experiences, temporalities, and structural forces into a single frame. They simultaneously depict the fervent push for new development and urban renewal, the decaying conditions of mobile homes, and the quiet poetry of daily life within these communities. For Waisman the photographs pose pressing questions about the invisibility of mobile home communities, their histories, and their uncertain futures amidst the ongoing housing affordability crisis. At the same time, they highlight the resilience of individuals through vignettes that reveal the overlooked joys of everyday life, suggesting that the idea of home balances delicately between memory and an encroaching reality.
While the images engage with the contemporary housing market as a point of entry, their narrative extends further back, tracing the construction of the "American Dream" and the ideals of homeownership shaped in the post-World War Il era. They also reflect on how historical redlining, climate change, and economic inequality have eroded access to that dream. By presenting this layered, nuanced view, Waisman transforms the complexities of contemporary housing struggles into a compelling narrative, blending documentary photography with a sharp, analytical lens. Read more »
November 21, 2024 – March 30, 2025
Coral Gables Museum
A Legacy in Light
Gallery 109 & Anthony R. Abraham Family Gallery
Curated by Yuneikys Villalonga, Director of Curatorial Programs, CGM
In Collaboration with The CINTAS Foundation
A Legacy in Light brings together a selection of the exceptional photographic works within the CINTAS Foundation’s collection. This segment of the Foundation’s archives, built over the years, represents diverse perspectives and creative visions. While most of the artists in the show are Visual Arts recipients of the prestigious CINTAS Fellowships, the Foundation has recently introduced a Photography category, whose winners are also included. This is not only evidence of the importance that this institution grants to the medium, but also of the significant presence that photography has within the complex and rich landscape of Cuban art and culture.
Established in 1957 through the estate of Oscar B. Cintas, a Cuban industrialist and diplomat, the CINTAS Foundation annually awards fellowships to artists of Cuban citizenship or descent. True to Cintas’ vision of promoting Cuban artistic expression, the Foundation has awarded over 300 fellowships in the fields of and curated the largest collection of Cuban art outside Cuba, fostering the career of Cuban artists for more than 50 years. Read more »