‘María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold’

The Getty Center, Los Angeles

There are exhibitions that decorate a museum, and then there are exhibitions that haunt it. Behold, the sprawling, soul-charged retrospective of María Magdalena Campos-Pons at the Getty, does the latter — not with theatricality, but with reverence, ritual, and the weight of centuries humming beneath every installation.

Campos-Pons is not interested in pleasing. She is interested in truth-telling — in ancestral frequencies, in bloodlines, in memory as an act of defiance. And Behold is her cathedral. Across sculpture, photography, painting, video, and performance, she constructs an altarpiece to Black womanhood, Caribbean identity, Yoruba spirituality, and the fractured, hybrid legacies of diaspora.

The show unfolds like an incantation. You don’t walk from room to room; you’re led — by cowrie shells, sugarcane, hair, salt, and smoke. Symbols, for Campos-Pons, aren’t static. They work. They chant. They resurrect. A row of suspended garments becomes a stand-in for disappeared bodies. A series of large-scale Polaroids depicts the artist herself — multiplied, veiled, maternal, divided. The personal is never just personal here. It’s genealogical. It’s geopolitical.

Perhaps the most searing aspect of Behold is its deliberate slowness. Campos-Pons resists the frantic pace of contemporary art consumption. Her pieces demand stillness, absorption, and — yes — discomfort. Her material language is tactile and evocative, but always in service to something deeper: a conversation with the dead, with the dislocated, with the divine.

In one corner, a video performance shows Campos-Pons walking in white, pouring water, invoking the orishas. It’s not “performance art” in the Western sense — it’s an offering. And it makes the Getty’s slick marble floors feel like hallowed ground.

But don’t mistake this reverence for passivity. Behold is not polite. It implicates. It confronts colonial violence without spectacle. It addresses the brutality of sugar economies, the fetishisation of Black and brown bodies, the erasure of matrilineal knowledge. And yet, Campos-Pons doesn’t let pain have the final word. Her practice is deeply invested in healing — but not the Instagram kind. The sacred kind. The difficult kind. The kind passed down through women who know how to survive.

Behold is not just a title. It’s a command. To witness. To honour. To stop scrolling and see.

Campos-Pons doesn’t need to raise her voice to be radical. She speaks in ritual, in repetition, in tenderness that trembles with power.

And we’d do well to listen with our whole bodies.