Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory by Laura E. Pérez and Maria Esther Fernández
This first major retrospective of Amalia Mesa-Bains unearths her significant contributions to Chicanx/Latinx art and feminism.
Featured in OMCA's exhibit Calli: The Xicanx Peoples and best known for her pioneering altar installations, Amalia Mesa-Bains is one of the most innovative feminist and Latinx artists of her generation. In her forty-year career as an artist, activist, educator, and scholar, she has explored the experiences, spiritual practices, and histories of Mexican American women and addressed the colonial erasure and recovery of Mexican, African American, and Indigenous Californians. Appropriately called an "archaeological" practice, Mesa-Bains's art creates sacred spaces imbued with cultural memory, leading viewers on a magical journey of discovery through what might otherwise be lost to existing canons of history.
