Amalia mesa bains books

Amalia mesa-bains altars
Amalia mesa-bains: archaeology of memory
Amalia mesa-bains museo del barrio

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Amalia Mesa-Bains Creates Sacred Space for Women and Memory

by Tey Marianna Nunn, director of the American Women’s History Initiative, part of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum

As a visual artist, writer, cultural historian, activist, and trailblazer, Dr. Amalia Mesa-Bains changed the course of Chicana, Feminist, and American art. While she is best known for her large-scale installations, her visual and written work spans decades and has earned recognition and awards, including the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1993.

Throughout her multi-media work, she restores memory, ensures a historical narrative, and invites her audience to participate in her visual production. Her prowess in incorporating and honoring women and their stories into the art historical continuum is breathtaking to say the least.

One of Mesa-Bains’s vehicles for expression comes from the tradition of altar making in Chicano and Latino communities. This honorific practice connects individuals with those they wish to remember by gathering and placing photos, candles, and

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Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory

Born in 1943 in Santa Clara, California, to immigrant parents, Mesa-Bains is an artist, activist, educator, and scholar who has explored the experiences, spiritual practices, and histories of Mexican-American women and the colonial erasure and recovery of Mexican, African-American, and Indigenous Californians. In the mid-1970s, she first innovated with sacred forms rooted in Mexican Indigenous practices of honoring one’s familial ancestors, including altares (home altars), ofrendas (offerings to the dead), and descansos (roadside resting places). These works—now considered her signature altar-installations—also honor the memories of the artist’s cultural predecessors, including Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Santa Teresa de Avila, Frida Kahlo, and other women whose lives defied societal norms and expectations of the times. Mesa-Bains eventually expanded her installation-based works to explore more public environments such as laboratories, libraries, gardens, and landscapes.

IMAGE CREDIT
Amalia Mesa-Bains, Queen of the Waters, Mother of the
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Amalia Mesa-Bains has garnered international recognition for multimedia installations that evoke the Chicana experience. This lively book recounts pivotal moments from her life, career, and collaborations, examining the intertwined worlds of Latinx culture, social movements, and contemporary art.
Esteemed cultural historian Tomás Ybarra-Frausto relates Mesa-Bains’s life to contemporary events and her artistic and intellectual production to her concept of domesticana (a feminist interpretation of rasquachismo) and her mestiza identity. He demonstrates how the Chicano movement attuned the artist to her Mexican heritage, sparking her interest in the traditional home altars that became the aesthetic and cultural inspiration for her art.
Employing detailed descriptions and analyses of key works, this book is an “art historical biography-memoire,” offering a uniquely personal understanding of Mesa-Bains’s prolific artistic practice and situating her life and art in the cultural and political milieu of the United States since the 1960s.
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