Many San Antonians who visit the Amalia Mesa-Bains exhibition at the San Antonio Museum of Art will find the form of her artwork familiar.
Mesa-Bains creates altares and ofrendas in memory of loved ones and cherished historical figures, bringing a longstanding cultural tradition common in Mexican and Mexican American communities to contemporary art museums.
The exhibition, titled Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory, traces 45 years of the California-based artist’s career in 10 installations spanning the museum’s special exhibitions galleries, plus framed works on paper including accordion-fold books and codex-style collages.
Strong women from her own ancestry and from history are represented throughout the exhibition in images and text, including Santa Teresa de Avila, Gloria Anzaldúa, Frida Kahlo, Eleanor Heartney, Mesoamerican goddess Coatlicue, 17th-century Mexican nun and polymath Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Mesa-Bains’ own grandmother, Mariana Escobedo Mesa, a healer whose work has informed materials the artist incorporates into her work.
60 years making art
Mesa-Bains said she started at Santa Fe State University in the early 1960s making what she termed “car art,” then moved to San Francisco and came up in the politically-charged Chicano movement era, working as an artist contributing to the “cultural reclamation and political justice struggle.”
Her early art teacher mentor Yolanda Garfias Woo taught her the Oaxacan Day of the Dead ofrendas tradition, and Mesa-Bains set about “trying to reclaim traditional forms” from being lost amid Eurocentric historical narratives and pressures among Latino communities to assimilate to mainstream American culture.
Those early artworks are not on view at the San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA), or anywhere else, Mesa-Bains said, because they were made as ephemeral artworks. She said she’s worked as an artist for 60 years, but only 45 of those years are represented in the exhibition because the first temporary works are lost to time.
Given the number of objects and their meticulous placement in each installation at SAMA, the newer work might also appear ephemeral. Still, each is diligently recorded after creation and those instructions are closely followed each time Mesa-Bains’ artworks are displayed in a museum or gallery, said Adriana Gomez del Campo, the museum’s public relations and digital communications manager.
‘No place for us’
In considering powerful women in history who have been overlooked or oppressed for their intelligence and fortitude, the content of Mesa-Bains’ artwork parallels her own career as a female artist.
In the 1960s and ’70s, she said, she and her fellow Chicana activist artists had no interest in museums or art galleries. “That wasn’t even in our vision at the time. Our job was simply to create work that would inspire and educate our own communities, and maybe to some degree, begin to tell our stories to people outside our community.”
More pointedly, she said of Latina artists, “I always knew there was no place for us” in mainstream museum culture. “We virtually were non-existent in many, many ways.”
When Mesa-Bains began showing in smaller museums in the 1980s, she said, her work was largely misunderstood as nostalgic, sentimental or shamanic due to widespread unfamiliarity with the traditions she employed.
Things started changing for Black women and Latina artists, in large part because representation in the curatorial staffs of museums and galleries had improved. Only as she neared age 80 did she receive her first retrospective exhibition, Mesa-Bains said.
Even so, only three of her pieces had been sold throughout her career until recent purchases by museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the National Gallery of Art.
“In the case of someone like myself, a Chicana from a founding generation, I was driven by the purposefulness of trying to change people’s understanding of my culture and my community and my life as a woman,” Mesa-Bains said.
“And when people came in the last maybe four or five years to really want to understand it, that was a little bit of a shock for me, because I didn’t really anticipate that in any way.”
Having borne direct witness over the course of her career to Latina artists receiving little attention until recently, Mesa-Bains said, “this is a large systemic change that’s been 30 years in the making.”
What’s new is ancient
The mirrored surfaces Mesa-Bains employs throughout her artwork are meant to include the viewer’s self-image in the work, Gomez del Campo said. The artist scrapes the reflective lining from the back of the mirror to show images of herself and her mother and grandmother, as well as other figures, to suggest that recognition of women has remained out of sight.
But in many works, including the sardonically titled Venus Envy series of installations, figures such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz are honored with the stature they deserve but were historically denied.
The intricately detailed and rich collection of objects references De la Cruz’s famed library, scientific laboratory and musical and poetry salon, and quotes from writings considered “the first proto-feminist manifesto of the colonial Americas,” according to the explanatory wall label accompanying the artwork.
During a tour through the exhibition, Gomez del Campo said that the cracks in the elaborately framed tripartite mirror featuring De la Cruz’s image were not made by the artist, but made accidentally by a shipper moving the work. Gomez del Campo explained that the artist accepted the cracks as part of the artwork and felt that the injury “ended up being the perfect addition to that piece.”
Reflecting on the Archaeology of Memory exhibition as a whole, Mesa-Bains said every piece in the show was made “while I was in various stages of illness and recovery,” from heart and lung disease, then a catastrophic automobile accident just before she turned 50 that caused a broken neck, back, arm and leg, followed by a spate of heart disease.
“I’ve been in states of either surgery, recovery, physical therapy, and meditation and psychological change for all of these 35 years of work. And so for me, making the work is my way of living and continuing to heal myself and to have the energy to go forth,” she said.
And though she is referred to as a pioneer in bringing altar-making to contemporary art spaces, she eschews the term for its colonial implications and said she accepts being called an “avant-garde” artist, though no one should mistake her forms as new.
“What they think is new is ancient, really ancient,” she said. Acknowledging the historical and ancestral figures in her work, Mesa-Bains said, “I’m in a long line of people who have used cultural and spiritual material to talk about the world around them.”
Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory is on view at the San Antonio Museum of Art through Jan. 12.
