This exhibition brings together works from the MFA’s collection by María Magdalena Campos-Pons (b. 1959) and Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) in the first focused look at these influential artists side by side. Though the two never met, their practices share a reckoning with displacement and exile from their homes in Cuba, a deep reverence for the land, and a transformative use of natural elements like water, earth, and fire. For both artists, memory, ritual, and spirituality animate their artworks across photography, film, video, drawing, sculpture, installation, and performance.

Central to the exhibition—and on view at the MFA for the first time—is Campos-Pons’s major installation A Town Portrait (1994), created in collaboration with Neil Leonard, from her series History of a People Who Were Not Heroes. A multimedia work in red clay, glass, and steel that evokes the structures, landscape, and legacies of the colonial sugar industry, A Town Portrait materializes family memories in what the artists calls a “counter-history” and “a monument to the history of every single Black family in Cuba.” It joins prints and expressive photography by the artist in an exploration of her practice over decades, with special emphasis on the nearly 30 years she lived and worked in Boston, between 1991 and 2017.

For Mendieta, performance and photography were one way to merge existence with the land, in what she termed “earth-body” artworks. Several examples from Mendieta’s influential Silueta series (1973–80) are on view, exploring the impression of her body on shorelines, in grassy fields, and in conversation with universal cycles of growth and decay. As both Campos-Pons and Mendieta faced disconnection from their homes and families, they also found ways to remain connected to their pasts in their new environments.