Amalia Mesa-Bains, whose work helped bring Chicana art into the mainstream, had a retrospective exhibition, Archeology of Memory, at the Phoenix Art Museum.
Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archeology of Memory
November 5, 2023–February 25, 2024
Phoenix Art Museum
For more than four decades, California-based artist Amalia Mesa-Bains has been creating work rooted in her Chicana identity and feminist sensibilities, shaping an art practice that’s intensely intimate and personal even as it speaks to wider themes such as marginalization, spirituality, female empowerment, and healing.
Mesa-Bains forged a path for subsequent artists by bringing Chicana, Mexicana, and Latina culture into the mainstream of contemporary art, and by integrating objects related to domestic life into artworks that speak to broader spheres of influence. She has also popularized and expanded the use of altars in art installations by including forms beyond the ofrendas affiliated with the Day of the Dead and using unconventional objects such as armoires as their foundations.
More than forty of her works created between 1991 and 2022 were recently on view at Phoenix Art Museum, as part of the retrospective exhibition Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archeology of Memory, curated by Maria Esther Fernández and Laura E. Pérez and organized by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Throughout this exhibition, comprising installations, palimpsest prints, handmade books, and codices, the artist affirms her oft-stated belief that memory serves as a bridge connecting the present with the past, and the living with the dead. Some installations, such as the Circle of Ancestors (1995) with seven bejeweled chairs conceived as altars to seven rebellious women, and An Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio (1991) with a vanity transformed into an altar for a famous Mexican actress, pay homage to ancestors or cultural icons. Others, such as Venus Envy Chapter IV: The Road to Paris and Its Aftermath, The Curandera’s Botanica (2008), which addresses the artist’s recovery from a tragic car accident with elements including a medicine cabinet, and Venus Envy Chapter I: First Holy Communion, Moments Before the End (2022), which was undertaken in response to her younger sister’s death, explore personal experiences and family histories.
Works centered on historic and contemporary experiences of colonization, migration, and cultural erasure are particularly impactful. With What the River Gave to Me (2002), a mixed-media installation suggesting the female form, the artist references the Rio Grande, which her parents crossed to become undocumented immigrants living in California. A text panel notes that the dozens of glass forms she used to craft the river are inscribed with the names of “those who made the perilous journey” across the border, but here their identity is a mystery.
Collectively, this alluring amalgamation of materials, including voluminous fabrics, resplendent armoires, framed mirrors, and dried botanicals coupled with photographs, found objects, and mementos, delivers a thrilling sense of wonderment that draws viewers into both the artist’s and their own tableaus of memory and arcs of imagination.
