Pioneering Bay Area artist Amalia Mesa-Bains’ evocative ‘altar installations’ at the Berkeley Art Museum explore feminist themes and Chicana culture.
at UC Berkeley’s Department of Ethnic Studies and chair of the Latinx Research Center. The exhibit runs through July 23.
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.
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.
“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.”
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