Julie Rodrigues Widholm was on the job just two days as executive director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive when she received an e-mail that would lead in spectacular fashion to one of her goals: bringing greater visibility to the works of United States-based artists of Latin American heritage.
The result of her e-mail contact with a pair of eager curators is “Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory,” the first retrospective for the 79-year-old Bay Area artist. Lauded as a pioneering feminist and Chicana artist, her work celebrates and transforms traditional practices such as home altars and roadside shrines.
Mesa-Bains’ densely packed installations fill the Berkeley Art Museum’s spacious galleries, rewarding multiple visits. And there’s more detail and personal background in the exhibit’s scholarly catalog.
“Archaeology of Memory” is curated by Maria Esther Fernandez, artistic director of the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture at the Riverside Art Museum, and Laura Elisa Pérez, a professor
at UC Berkeley’s Department of Ethnic Studies and chair of the Latinx Research Center. The exhibit runs through July 23.Almost all of the works, the museum points out, offer a feminist perspective on the domestic life of immigrant and Mexican American women across history. The most stunning is the four-part installation series “Venus Envy,” displayed in its entirety for the first time at the museum. And there’s more: 12 large-scale installations in all, plus 21 prints and seven books.
Mesa-Bains’ works are both personal and historical, specific and symbolic, intimate and flamboyant. The exhibit opens with an elaborate altar-like vanity featuring Coatlicue, an Aztec earth goddess, and it closes with another vanity, “An Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio,” celebrating the Mexican-born Hollywood screen goddess who flourished in the 1930s and ‘40s.
As comprehensive as this retrospective is, there’s more to Mesa-Bains’ story.
“For decades,” Widholm writes, “she has led by example as a creative practitioner, scholarly writer, public educator and activist. Her work will no doubt help to redefine American art and inspire generations to come.”
She was born Maxine Amalia Marie Mesa to Mexican immigrant parents in Santa Clara in 1943. Her family actively supported her early interest in art, buying her an easel when she was 7 or 8 years old, according to the exhibit catalog’s chronology. Since artists’ paper was expensive, her father Lorenzo brought home the ends of the butcher paper rolls from the grocery store where he worked.
Eventually she enrolled at San Jose State University and earned a degree in painting in 1966 but then broadened her horizons of art technique. She married Richard Bains in 1967; they moved to San Francisco during the “Summer of Love.”
In 1967 she placed her first work in an exhibit, a metal-flake painting with a sculptural element based on car art. In the early 1970s she created her first altar-like work at the Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco’s Mission district, and her artistic path was set.
I first encountered Mesa-Bains’ work, “An Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio,” at the Oakland Museum in 2002, part of the remarkable touring exhibit, “Arte Latino: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum.” Mesa-Bains has organized and curated many exhibits herself, and her works have been seen everywhere from a branch of New York’s Whitney Museum to the de Saisset Museum in her hometown of Santa Clara.
This first career retrospective spans decades, and the breadth and depth, the gravity and ingenuity of Mesa-Bains’ artwork is astonishing. That first installation with the image of Coatlicue is followed by a “The Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” a detailed tribute to the 17th-century Mexican nun who amassed a library of more than 4,000 books but was forced by her bishop to give up her intellectual pursuits.
Next is “The Virgin’s Garden,” an armoire inspired by a 15th-century European painting by an unknown artist referred to as Upper Rhenish Master, “The Little Garden of Paradise.” The installation imagines what the Virgin Mary might wear. Hanging in the armoire are capes created by Christiane Parker; Mesa-Bains’ mother sewed most of the original garments for the work.
“Cihuateotl with Mirror” dominates a wide swath of an open gallery: an overscale moss-covered figure sprawled across the floor, looking like a close-cropped topiary, gazing into a giant hand mirror. The figure, the curators explain, “embodies the land as a sacred, feminine landscape.”
Seven hand-painted chairs, with mirrors, jewels and candles, make up an expansive “Circle of Ancestors,” each “an altar to a rebellious woman.” The subjects range from the goddess Coyolxauhqui to another Chicana artist, Judy Baca, to Mesa-Bains herself as a child during her First Holy Communion.
There is more history in “What the River Gave to Me,” with the Rio Grande magically transformed by hand-blown glass rocks made by Viviana Paredes. “Private Landscapes and Public Territories” refers to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican War in 1848 — but also references the journeys of Mesa-Bains’ ancestors across both countries.
In the catalog, Widholm salutes the exhibit planners’ “tireless work in our shared pursuit of remaking knowledge and building new histories.” But she also describes what seems to be simple and effective for Mesa-Bains: “The family stories interwoven through her work beautifully demonstrate how the personal is political.”
‘AMALIA MESA-BAINS: ARCHAEOLOGY OF MEMORY’
Through: July 23
Where: Berkeley Art Museum-Pacific Film Archive, 2155 Center St, Berkeley
Hours: 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday
Admission: $12-$14; 510-642-0808, bampfa.org
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