The San Antonio Museum of Art presents "Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory," the first retrospective exhibition by the influential Chicana artist and cultural critic.
August 20 – August 20, 2024
August 20 – August 20, 2024
San Antonio, TX—August 20, 2024—This fall, the San Antonio Museum of Art will present the nationally touring Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory, a retrospective celebrating the pioneering artist’s contributions to the field of contemporary art. Hailed by the New York Times as “powerful and overdue,” Archaeology of Memory will be on view in the Cowden Gallery from September 20, 2024, through January 12, 2025.
Dried lavender, chemistry beakers, crushed glass, lotería cards, oxygen cords, armoires, seashells, a First Communion gown, and family photographs—this is just a small sampling of the materials, imbued with memory, that Amalia Mesa-Bains has incorporated into her room-sized installations over forty-five years of artistic practice. Known for pioneering the genre of altar-installations, Mesa-Bains has innovated sacred forms such as altares (home altars), ofrendas (offerings to the dead), descansos (roadside resting places), and capillas (home yard shrines) to recover cultural memory and position Chicana art into the broader field of contemporary American art. In 1992, Mesa-Bains received a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (commonly known as a “genius grant”), the only Chicana visual artist to be recognized with the award, and her first retrospective exhibition is long overdue.
“Mesa-Bains creates intricate, astonishing, multi-layered installations often containing hundreds of objects that together provide the visitor an immersive experience of exquisite beauty. Prepare to be mesmerized by the power of her work—an artistic voice so powerful, ArtNews dubbed our time ‘the Age of Amalia,’” said Emily Ballew Neff, PhD, The Kelso Director at SAMA. “SAMA could not be prouder to present the first retrospective of this influential contemporary artist’s career.”
Mesa-Bains’s altar works from the mid-1970s, rooted in Mexican Indigenous practices of honoring one’s ancestors, are part of the history of the now widespread Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebrations in the US. As an altarista (one who makes altars), her elaborate, albeit ephemeral, altars were assemblages of spiritual and domestic objects dedicated to women and honoring the cultural history of Mexico. In moving the personal practice of altares and ofrendas out of domestic spaces and into public galleries, her work engaged with feminist ideas along with acts of cultural reclamation during the Chicano Movement. By the 1990s, Mesa-Bains’s practice had shifted to more permanent installations—and from altar-inspired works to expansive tableaux evoking laboratories, libraries, gardens, and landscapes as sites to examine the construction of spaces and the cultural memories engrained in them.
"Mesa-Bains’s work is a feast for the eyes and the mind, sparking vital conversations about identity and cultural history,” said Lana Meador, Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art. “It is an honor to present this exhibition at SAMA and explore the many rich connections Mesa-Bains’s work makes with our global collections.”
In addition to holding a bachelor’s degree in painting from San Jose State University, Mesa-Bains earned a doctorate in clinical psychology from the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California. The intersections of these fields become strikingly present as Mesa-Bains’s richly layered installations that explore such themes as life, death, family, migration, womanhood, healing, and resiliency. Her overflowing armoires and cabinets recall Wunderkammern—“cabinets of curiosities” in Renaissance Europe that displayed collections of natural and human-made objects from around the world and are considered a precursor to museums. However, Mesa-Bains forges a new vision of the world bringing unacknowledged histories to the fore. Through objects and imagery that are drawn from folk traditions, art history, domestic spaces, spiritual practices, ancestral history, and personal mementos, she excavates untold and underrecognized narratives. Her major series of four multimedia installations, titled Venus Envy, spans varied cultures and historical periods to celebrate heroic, archetypal, mythic, and ancestral women, including Cihuateotl (“Divine Woman” in Mexica (Aztec) tradition), Mexica deity Coatlicue, Mexican colonial-era polymath Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and the artist’s grandmother Mariana Escobedo Mesa.
Archaeology of Memory features forty works created from 1991 to 2024 in a range of media, including ten installations and a film of the artist in her studio directed by Raymond Telles. SAMA’s presentation of the exhibition marks the premiere of a new large-scale sculpture that explores the celestial space of Cihuatlampa, the Mexica afterlife of women who died in childbirth.
The Museum will also host a conversation with Amalia Mesa-Bains, PhD, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, PhD, independent scholar of Latina/o art and culture, on Friday, September 20, 2024, at 6:00 p.m. This program is open to the public and will be livestreamed.
There will be a full slate of thematic programming in conjunction with Archaeology of Memory, including an ofrenda designed by Amalia Mesa-Bains in honor of Emma Tenayuca, a movie screening, and kids’ and teens’ art studios.
Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory is organized by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in collaboration with the Latinx Research Center (LRC) at UC Berkeley.
The exhibition is made possible by generous lead support from the Henry Luce Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
In San Antonio, Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory has been generously supported by The Brown Foundation. Additional funding comes from the John R. & Greli N. Less Charitable Trust, the Marcia and Otto Koehler Foundation, and Chave and Bill Gonzaba. The Museum is thankful to all SAMA members for their support of the exhibition.
The exhibition is curated by María Esther Fernández, Artistic Director, The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum, and Laura E. Pérez, Professor of Chicanx, Latinx and Ethnic Studies and Chair of Latinx Research Center, UC Berkeley. Curatorial responsibility at the San Antonio Museum of Art has been undertaken by Lana S. Meador.
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Image credit: Amalia Mesa-Bains: What the River Gave to Me, 2002; mixed media installation including hand-carved and painted sculptural landscape, LED lighting, crushed glass, hand-blown and engraved glass rocks, candles; 48 x 48 x 168 in.; courtesy of the artist and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco. Photo: John Janca.
