María Magdalena Campos-Pons is an installation artist, photographer, and performance artist who creates work that is an open-ended and continually evolving investigation of history and memory and examines how both impact the formation of identity. Challenging notions of race, nation, gender, and class, she makes the complex journey into individual self-determination, drawing her inspiration from the Cuban society from which she originates, her American home, and the world at large. The two women in this double portrait hold strings of multicolored beads reminiscent of those worn by devotees of various Afro-Cuban religions. The colors relate to different deities or orishas in the Yoruba pantheon. The blue and clear beads held by the older woman signify Yemayá, the two-headed goddess of the sea. The pearls are particular to Obatalá, the creator god, and indicate serenity. Dressed in flowing white clothes befitting a Santería initiate, the younger woman (the artist herself) holds the red-spotted yellow and amber beads proper to Ochún, who is associated with sexuality and motherhood. While the partitioned format creates a sense of fragmentation between the women (Campos-Pons has not seen her mother since she left Cuba in 1991), the beads suggest that the figures are bound together by ritual and tradition.