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Over a long career of art and activism, Amalia Mesa-Bains has been a vigorous champion of Chicano culture and the experiences of women within that culture. Her altar-like installations, which draw from her own life as a Californian daughter of Mexican immigrants, command space with a dizzying array of personal effects and mementos.
They take aim at some dauntingly big targets: the Roman Catholic Church, colonialism, the patriarchy. And they emphasize overlooked histories with sheer, undeniable accretion, or what the artist has called an “aesthetic of accumulation: accumulation of experience, reference, memory, and transfiguration.”
Now, in a powerful and overdue exhibition at El Museo del Barrio, Mesa-Bains is acting as her own best advocate. At 80, after a series of health struggles, she is taking control of her legacy in a show that links all of her major installations for the first time. This process is more complicated than it sounds: Many of Mesa-Bains’s early works, consisting of found objects from friends and family, were originally meant to be ephemeral, and she often recycled their components from one project to the next (adapting the Chicano strategy of reuse that had come to be known within the community as “rasquachismo.”) Some of the works at El Museo have been updated and expanded, or edited down, from their initial presentations. So although the exhibition is technically a retrospective, it’s also a singular, career-defining new mega-work.
“Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory” comes to El Museo from the Phoenix Art Museum and, before that, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where it was organized in collaboration with the Latinx Research Center at Berkeley. The El Museo presentation (overseen by the museum’s curator Susanna V. Temkin, with the curatorial fellow Chloë Courtney) is Mesa-Bains’s first New York museum solo since 1993, when she had a single-room installation at the midtown branch of the Whitney.
Coming just a year after her receipt of the MacArthur award in 1992, the Whitney show was something of a breakout moment. Other exhibitions and accolades followed, most of them on the West Coast, where Mesa-Bains was born and raised, in Santa Clara, Calif., and where she had established herself as a professor at the University of California, Irvine (with a doctorate in clinical psychology) and a leader in the Chicano art community.
El Museo’s exhibition begins with the work that was exhibited at the Whitney, “Venus Envy Chapter I: First Holy Communion, Moments Before the End.” The first installation in her four-part “Venus Envy” series exploring traditionally female spaces and rituals (the title is a play on Freud’s “penis envy”), it reinterprets the Catholic tradition of the first communion so as to foreground women’s agency and desire. While surrounding us with white lacy dresses and flower petals, prayer books and rosaries, Mesa-Bains also presents us with images of the fear-inspiring Aztec deity Coatlicue (associated with death and rebirth) and the 16th-century Spanish nun Santa Teresa de Ávila (who described her religious ecstasy in robustly physical terms).
All of this unfolds in a gallery made to look like a teenage girl’s dressing room, with a mirrored vanity. In the second “Venus Envy” installation, first seen at a 1994 solo exhibition at the Williams College Museum of Art, Mesa-Bains evokes other types of cloistered women’s spaces: a library, a walled garden, and — in a twist — a harem. This ambitious, multisensory piece unfolds as a series of period rooms. It leaps across centuries and continents, with areas representing the imperial harem of the Ottoman Empire (which Mesa-Bains had visited in Turkey), a “Virgin’s Garden” modeled on a 15th-century Northern European painting, and the library of the Mexican nun and feminist pioneer Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
The connection is hard to grasp, but it has to do with women who were fenced in and found power in sisterhood. (In the show’s catalog, Mesa-Bains writes that as a doctoral student she kept a framed image of Sor Juana over her worktable “to remind me that if a solitary nun beset by men of the church could be an intellectual and spiritual being in the 17th century, then I could be one in the 20th century.”) Mirrors and richly colored and patterned textiles, along with a scattering of dried lavender and other botanicals, help to create continuity.
The third installation in the “Venus Envy” series, originally presented in 1997 at Steinbaum Krauss Gallery in New York — now retitled “Cihuateotl With Mirror From Private Landscapes and Public Territories” — centers on a mythical space where women reigned: Cihuatlampa, known in Aztec cosmology as a home for the spirits of female warriors. The main set piece is a larger-than-life reclining figure, covered in moss, who gazes into a giant hand mirror. The image of the Virgin of Montserrat, known as the “Black Virgin,” peers back at her. It’s a display of woman-worship anchored in several different cultural representations, including the reclining Venus of Western art history. It’s also a kind of self-portrait, reinforced by a supporting photographic artwork titled “Amazona Azteca” and showing Mesa-Bains striking a power pose as the Aztec goddess Tlazolteotl.
Vulnerable bodies, as opposed to strong ones, haunt the fourth and final installment of “Venus Envy.” Originally exhibited in 2008, it followed the artist’s five-year recovery from a life-threatening car accident. It takes the form of the botanica of a curandera, or folk healer, and among the objects presented are natural and spiritual remedies — dried plants, a rattlesnake skin, and a votive offering — interspersed with paraphernalia from Western medicine, such as chemistry beakers and a metal laboratory table. Here too are pieces of Mesa-Bains’s personal and family medical history, including her own oxygen tubes and her sister’s hospital bracelets.
In Chicano culture this kind of repurposing of the detritus of daily living, or “rasquachismo,” has been associated with values like resilience and resourcefulness (as well as an attitude of defiance). In her critical writing Mesa-Bains put a feminist spin on the idea, calling attention to the ways in which Latino women were working with found objects in their homes. “Established through continuities of spiritual belief, pre-Hispanic in nature, the family altar functions for women as a counterpoint to male-dominated rituals within Catholicism,” she wrote in her 1999 essay “‘Domesticana’: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache.” The term has endured: In 2022, El Museo mounted the intergenerational group show of Latinx artists “Domesticanx” in tribute to Mesa-Bains.
In her writing, and in her many artworks dedicated to notable women, Mesa-Bains has repeatedly elevated other Chicana artists (including her contemporaries Judy Baca and Virginia Jaramillo) and paid homage to the familial and historical figures who inspire her. The final installation in “Archaeology of Memory” is titled “Circle of Ancestors,” and brings to mind the cross-historical feminist gathering of Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party.” Seven hand-painted, jewel-encrusted chairs are arranged around a cluster of candles; each chair has a mirrored seat back emblazoned with a portrait. Among the women depicted are Baca, Sor Juana, Mesa-Bains’s grandmother Mariana Escobedo Mesa, and Mesa-Bains herself (seen in a picture from her first holy communion).
The message in this piece — and in this inspiring retrospective — is clear: If you don’t have a seat at the ceremonial table of art history, make your own table, your own ceremony. Write, teach, organize, create. Honor those working alongside you and those who came before you. Then, pull up a chair.
Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory
Through Aug. 11, El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue; (212) 831-7272, elmuseo.org.
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