One Night Only! María Magdalena Campos Pons and Kamaal Malak

One-night-only outdoor projection and performance
Friday, December 5, 2025
6–7 p.m. reception; 7 p.m. performance
Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture (CADVC), UMBC

The Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture (CADVC) at UMBC presents a special one-night-only outdoor screening and performance with KaMag, the performance collaboration between artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons and musician Kamaal Malak.

Vignettes in 3 Sessions: An Immersive Ancestral Experience with KaMag (María Magdalena Campos–Pons and Kamaal Malak) is an interactive performance created for CADVC. KaMag members of the public into a shared ritual environment—"a sacred space where ancestral energies transcend temporal boundaries, creating a transformative portal between past and present." The performance unfolds as a multi-media, multi-sensory sanctuary combining spoken word, live music, sound design, and other sensorial experiences in an intimate, participatory format.

The performance launches a new public projection of  "I am Soil – My Tears Are Water" (2025), a single-channel video by Kamaal Malak and María Magdalena Campos-Pons that has been adapted for the UMBC Fine Arts Building amphitheater projection program. Conceived for large-scale projection and collective viewing, the work transforms the amphitheater into a reflective gathering space, bringing KaMag's layered meditations on ancestry, land, and healing into public space.

KaMag's recent work has included major multi-sensory performances at institutions such as Tate Modern and KaMag's recent work has included major performances at institutions such as Tate Modern and the São Paulo Biennial, where Campos-Pons and Malak have developed a practice that bridges performance, sound, and moving image to explore Afro-diasporic spiritual, historical, and ecological inheritances.

This CADVC event is presented as part of UMBC's Arts+ initiative, a new campus-wide platform that celebrates and connects UMBC's vibrant and multi-faceted arts scene through public-facing programming and interdisciplinary creative research. Arts+ positions UMBC as a welcoming arts destination for the region, bringing together students, faculty, visiting artists, and community audiences for exhibitions, performances, and other collaborative events. CADVC also thanks CIRCA at UMBC for their support of the event.

About KaMag

María Magdalena Campos-Pons was born in 1959 in the province of Matanzas, in the town of La Vega, Cuba. Her work is autobiographical, investigating themes of history, memory, gender and religion and how they inform identity. She is a MacArthur Fellow (2023) and currently serves as the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair and Professor of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University, where she founded the Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice Program. She also launched Intermittent Rivers, a multi-artist initiative in Matanzas, Cuba, as part of the 2019 Havana Biennial. Her work has been presented at venues including the Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University; Peabody Essex Museum; National Portrait Gallery; Museum of Modern Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; List Visual Arts Center, MIT; Pérez Art Museum; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Johannesburg Biennial; Gwangju Biennale; Documenta; Venice Biennale; and the Brooklyn Museum.

Kamaal Malak is a multifaceted musician, producer, academic, and researcher whose career spans diverse areas of the music industry. As a bassist and songwriter with the 2x Grammy-winning group Arrested Development, they significantly influenced conscious hip-hop in the early 1990s. His versatility as an artist is further exemplified by his collaborations with country music icon Shania Twain, bridging genres and expanding his musical reach. Beyond his performance career, Malak has made significant strides in music production, blending hip-hop, electronic, and world music influences.