Drawing the Line: Amalia Mesa-Bains at San Antonio Museum of Art

Nancy Zastudil·
San AntonioVisual Art
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When did you first learn that art had power? For groundbreaking Chicana artist, activist, scholar, and educator Amalia Mesa-Bains, the revelation came to her as a child.

“Moving the pencil and thinking there was something magic about the line that came out of the pencil,” she says, “and then finally realizing, I’m making the line.”

The artist recounts this memory in a short video from the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive who, in collaboration with the Latinx Research Center (LRC) at UC Berkeley, organized the nationally touring exhibition Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory, on view at San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) from Sept. 20, 2024 to Jan. 12, 2025. The show celebrates Mesa-Bains’s more than forty-five years of artistic practice. Unique to SAMA’s iteration is the debut of her new, large-scale sculpture Cihuatlampa, which “explores the celestial space of the Mexica (Aztec) afterlife of women who died in childbirth.”

A third-generation artist and MacArthur fellow with a doctorate in clinical psychology, among other accolades, Mesa-Bains is known for pioneering the genre of altar-installations. She has been credited with bringing the Chicano/a community’s sacred forms of altares (home altars), ofrendas (offerings to the dead), descansos (roadside resting places), and capillas (home yard shrines) into the realm of contemporary art in the US.

“When I came into the Chicano movement in the early 1970s, there was no expectation that anyone else would want to see our work. We did our work for our own community, to build our own organizations. We really created our own venues,” she says.

Archaeology of Memory includes a range of media, featuring forty works created between 1991 and 2024. For example, Queen of the Waters, Mother of the Land of theDead: Homenaje a Tonatzin/Guadalupe (1992) is a two-tiered mirrored altar with a plethora of found objects, surrounded by dried flowers, dried pomegranate, and potpourri on the floor, with jeweled clocks under a satin fabric drape on the wall. The autobiographical Venus Envy Chapter I: First Holy Communion, Moments Before the End (1993/2022) presents a fabric-skirted chair and white vanity dresser, the surface of which is covered with feathers, pearls, photographs, and a myriad of personal and devotional objects.

Mesa-Bains tells me that she made these works, imbued with memory and history, when she was not in good health, including dealing with heart issues, an automobile accident, orthopedic problems, and a broken heart.

“I realize that I persisted in making the work because it was my salvation,” she says. “It was the way I would heal myself, and I couldn’t stop working. My mother and father died during that time, and then my brother died. So, throughout the show is grief, healing, and loss.” She also suffered the death of her younger sister, Judith, who ran her studio for years.

Mesa-Bains has taken note of people’s responses to the show, including those who are not in her community.

“When I would go to take pieces down after a show, I saw that people had slipped in notes, copies of green cards, folding cards from funerals—things would appear that I knew I’d never put in there,” she says. “That’s when I realized: Even though it’s not the same, and even though these may be different communities, they’re still having some sort of a ceremonial relationship with it.”

She explains that although she has had a long career, the museum world has not always embraced her work, which has been largely within the context of Chicana and Latina art. But Mesa-Bains counts herself lucky to have worked with curators who were instrumental in her exhibitions and museum acquisitions, including Laura E. Peréz, Professor of Chicanx in the Latinx and Ethnic Studies and Chair of LRC, who curated the retrospective; María Esther Fernández, Artistic Director at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum; Marcela Guerrero, DeMartini Family Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Carmen Ramos, former Smithsonian American Art Museum’s curator of Latinx art; Olga Vido, Selig Family Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at Phoenix Art Museum; and Susana Temkin at El Museo del Barrio.

The artist reflects, “It was a fortuitous time with the right people in the right places, and I’m very glad for it.”

It seems as though the line that Mesa-Bains has drawn extends beyond the paper. Whether it’s her revolutionary altar-installations or mutually supportive relationships with Latina curators—or any number of conversations, writings, and other offerings—she has used art’s power for good, saying, “In some ways I feel that I’m opening the door for some of the other artists of my generation.”

—NANCY ZASTUDIL

Nancy Zastudil

Nancy Zastudil is an editor and curator working toward equitable representation in and access to the arts.