Water and Art

Return to the full menu of María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Sea and Self interpretive materials

Water has been an inspiration for many artists. Through the work in this exhibition Campos-Pons investigates the memory of water, the fluidity of her art media and practice, and her personal connection to water.

Haggerty Museum of Art · María Magdalena Campos-Pons The Ocean is Blue

"The ocean is blue because it takes on the color of the heavens—there is darkness in certain spaces in the universe just as there is at the bottom of the ocean." 

 

Explore water and art in a variety of ways:

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Artworks featuring water from the Haggerty Museum of Art's collection

View artworks featuring water from the Haggerty Museum of Art's collection in a digital timeline on Tiki-Toki. These artworks are included in the Museum's Water Across the Curriculum (WAC) school program. 

digital timeline

The color blue

"But I went to the color blue, too, because I saw this amazing magnificence. Blue of the Renaissance murals, and I was mesmerized about what was this and how was it made?" - María Magdalena Campos-Pons

Learn more about the color blue in this video produced by London’s National Gallery. Investigate the story of natural ultramarine: where it came from, how famous painters used it, and how advances in chemistry during the 19th century enabled the production of a synthetic version that revolutionized painters’ palettes.

Memory of water

"I am trying to figure out how am I interested to talk about memory. What is the materiality of memory? That was my question. How do I represent the instability of remembering, the instability of keeping track of the past?"- María Magdalena Campos-Pons

Explore the Ocean Memory Project. This collaborative network of researchers from across the sciences, arts and humanities is dedicated to exploring the intersection of ocean and memory, and to advancing Ocean Memory as a new field of scholarship and creative expression.

 

Middle Passage

"The Middle Passage was the stage of the Atlantic slave trade in which millions of enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas as part of the triangular slave trade." (Source) 

Visit the National Park Service's Middle Passage website 

Utilize the Public Broadcasting Service Africans in America Resource Bank website.