Born in Santa Clara, California to a family of undocumented immigrants, Amalia Mesa-Bains became an essential figure of the Chicanx movement of the 1970s. As a curator, writer and educator, she developed a theory on the formation of Chicana identity through aesthetic practices and advocated for their representation in cultural institutions. As an artist, she developed a distinct style of contemporary installation in which personal and familial references were powerful vehicles for criticism of larger historical narratives, including colonial erasure. Her layered compositions borrow from home altars, roadside shrines and a number of spiritual practices including ofrenda (offerings to the dead). Situating these objects within libraries, laboratories, gardens, convents, and harems, Mesa-Bains transforms Eurocentric scenes into dazzling homages to Chicanx heritage. Her first retrospective, Archaeology of Memory, was organised by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in collaboration with the Latinx Research Center (LRC) at UC Berkeley in 2023, just as the artist turned 80. El Museo del Barrio is the only East Coast venue to host the travelling retrospective and has previously presented the artist’s work in group exhibitions including Artists Talk Back: Visual Conversations with El Museo, Part III, Reaffirming Spirituality (1995) and DOMESTICANX (2022-23). Mesa-Bains referred to the most recent collaboration as a homecoming.

Amalia Mesa-Bains is an adept storyteller. Encountering the lavish multimedia installations and contemporary codices in the exhibition, it’s clear that narrative has remained core to her practice. A complex arc emerges from over 40 works on display, including four chapters of the artist’s Venus Envy series (1994-2023). Sequenced together for the first time in Archaeology of Memory, Mesa-Bains draws from her education in clinical psychology to create a feminist alternative to Freudian theory. Chapter I: First Holy Communion: Moments Before the End (1993/2022) explores the archetypes of bride, nun and virgin through a configuration of vitrines and furnishings reminiscent of a museum; these are replete with personal and found ephemera reminiscent of the artist’s upbringing in the Catholic church. Central to this installation is the Boudoir Chapel, which features a vanity framed by silk drapery and set atop a layer of dried petals. Framed photographs, Virgin Mary figurines and perfume vials are scattered across a pearl-studded surface to make what is at once a young woman’s domestic fixture and an intimate shrine. In the mirror is an etched image of Coatlicue, the serpent-skirted goddess of life and death in Aztec mythology, a feature that recalls the ofrenda created by Mesa-Bains for her late sister for the retrospective’s iteration at BAMPFA. A skull peering out from one of the vanity’s open drawers indicates the artist’s tendency to hide smaller “shrines” within her installations, as well as her frequent incorporation of European art historical tropes.

Chapter II: The Harem and Other Enclosures (1994) expands upon the artist’s initial exploration of feminine environments. A bureau strewn with papers, globes and magnifying glasses resembles a three-dimensional still-life scene and functions as the focal point of Mesa-Bains’ reimagining of Mexican nun and early feminist intellectual Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s famed library. Repeating previous motifs of dressing room furniture, drapery, clothing, biblical figures and “a hall of mirrors,” the second chapter of Venus Envy evokes several environments at once: the harem, the garden and the convent. Mesa-Bains radically re-envisions these enclosed spaces as settings for complex female-centred social systems. This lush, verdant atmosphere returns in Chapter III: Cihuatlampa, the Place of the Giant Women (1997) with photo collages and large-scale garments that reference the heavenly paradise inhabited by women warriors in Nahua tradition. Among these monumental female figures—who were known for turning their backs on their traditional roles—is Cihuateotl with Mirror in Private Landscapes and Public Territories, a moss-covered goddess who reclines in front of another mirror partially emblazoned with religious iconography. The final chapter on display, Chapter IV: The Road to Paris and Its Aftermath, The Curandera’s Botanica (2008/2023), references the ancestral healing practices used by Mesa-Bains when recovering from a near-fatal accident in Paris in 2008. A steel table displays beakers and hospital paraphernalia on its upper level, with amulets, snakeskin and bundles of herbs piled below. Like the vitrines in the first chapter, Mesa-Bains has transformed the nearby hospital cabinet into a personal “cabinet of curiosities” by filling it with personal mementoes. 

Mesa-Bains adapts the ancient Indigenous form of the codex as a contemporary means of record-keeping, as well as a reclamation of pictographic writing that was destroyed during colonial invasions.

Bridging the chapters of the Venus Envy series is a number of codices, including paper collages and handmade accordion-style booklets. Mesa-Bains adapts the ancient Indigenous form of the codex as a contemporary means of record-keeping, as well as a reclamation of pictographic writing that was destroyed during colonial invasions. Much like her installations, the intricate superimposition of imagery displays the artist’s unique style of organising hoards of historic and familial information. Every piece in Archaeology of Memory is impossible to merely glance at— as much as they often resemble excavations, their many layers invite a viewer to further unearth and parse Mesa-Bains’ bounty of blended allusions. The retrospective offers a sense of abundance and accumulation while recognising the artist’s careful attention to continuity within her invented worlds. The overarching narrative within Mesa-Bains’ body of work reconciles the past and the present, the living and the dead. By keeping the record of the Chicanx experience open and resisting neat resolution, Archaeology of Memory platforms an act of defiant resilience in the face of repression.