María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s Anatomy of the Magnolia Tree for Koyo Kouoh and Toni Morrison (2026) is a monument in floral form. Eight tall panels hold portraits of Morrison, the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature, and Kouoh, the first African woman to curate the Biennale Arte, while seven sculptures in resin and glass express forms of the magnolia, the iconic flower of the American South. Anchored in Black women’s solidarity, the work holds its subjects in relation across disciplines, generations and geographies.
Kouoh and Morrison each devoted their work to the minor keys – “the quiet tones, lower frequencies, hums, consolations of poetry”, as Kouoh wrote in her curatorial statement. Morrison’s novels are love letters to the interior lives of Black women, while Kouoh cultivates gardens for Global South artists who contend with what Morrison described as “unyielding earth” in The Bluest Eye.
Through the installation’s scale, Campos-Pons performs a quiet inversion, making the minor major. In tandem, a soundscape by Kamaal Malak – bass guitar, synthesisers and layered loops in minor keys – treats lower frequencies as the room’s very architecture. Together, portraits and sound form a duet, inviting us to listen for the frequencies through which Black women’s work keeps remaking the world.
—Grace Aneiza Ali
