The work of Amalia Mesa-Bains reflects the length and breadth of an amazing life. First known as a Chicana installation artist associated with the Chicano art movement of the sixties and seventies, AMB has continued to expand her iconic role. The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is now presenting the first retrospective of her career.
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Listening to her speak at the Berkeley museum left me in awe of the depth of her explorations, as does a tour of her installations now on display. AMB’s “What the River Gave to Me” installation places migrations across the Rio Grande in a “spiritual landscape.” In “An Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio” — Hollywood’s first Mexican crossover actress — Mesa-Bains warmly explains the importance of this icon in her life and the lives of many generations of Mexican women.
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What the River Gave to Me, 2002
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An Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio, 1983/1991
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“Aztlan Revisited” reimagines a familiar image, retouched with bright and contemporary color, presenting a “declaration of independence of the Mestizo nation.”
How best to understand the process of AMB’s art?
“I am responding to either an irritation, an intuition, or an impulse,” she explains, “but then I begin the long process of sources, materials, interviews, research, and quirky ideas that I get based on musings that I have.”
Mesa-Bains sees memory as “a bridge between the living and the dead, between the past and the present,” as “a strategy and a trope that I found in most communities of color.” Our “love of the ancestor,” she adds, “drives us.”
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AMB’s complex work varies techniques and media to suit each particular story she’s telling. She doesn’t fear modern technology, but uses ancient knowledge — and makes stuff up freely when needed! Her melodic, flowing fabrics and design, her toughness and raw energy in the sources and materials she chooses, all bring beauty to us.
I’ve admired Mesa-Baines for years, never more so than now. Her installations take up more than the physical space they occupy, and photos simply do not do justice to their power. I haven’t always been a fan of installation art, but her work soars. You just have to see it.
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Activist Vicky Hamlin, a retired tradeswoman, shop steward, and painter, shines the light — in her art and this column — on the lives of working people and the world they live in.
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