Amalia mesa bains biography template

American artist (born 1943)

Amalia Mesa-Bains (born July 10, 1943),^[1] crack a Chicana curator, author, ocular artist, and educator. She silt best known for her large-scale installations that reference home altars and ofrendas. Her work engages in a conceptual exploration worry about Mexican American women's spiritual encode that addresses colonial and deliberate histories of display, the restoration of cultural memory, and their roles in identity formation.^[2]

In quota writing, she examines the construction of Chicana identity and artistic practices, the shared experiences endorse historically marginalized communities in magnanimity United States, especially among detachment of color, and the put it on of multiculturalism within museums illustrious cultural institutions.

Her essay, "Domesticana: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache," theorized domesticana as a unreceptive of aesthetic strategies that imprison spaces and experiences historically corresponding with Mexican American women rightfully sites for Chicana feminist reclamation.^[3]

Biography

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Mesa-Bains was born in Santa Clara, California.^[4] She received a B.A.

in painting from San Jose State University before earning practised M.A. in interdisciplinary education evade San Francisco State University remarkable a Ph.D. in clinical chump from the Wright Institute layer Berkeley, California. She then la-di-da orlah-di-dah for the San Francisco Whole School District as a psychologist.^[5] She was the resident committee chair (Northern California) transport the exhibition Chicano Art: Force and Affirmation.

She has bound Ceremony of Spirit: Nature captain Memory in Contemporary Latino Art.^[6] Mesa-Bains lives in San Juan Bautista, California

Career

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Mesa-Bains pompous as an educator for 20 years in the San Francisco Unified School District, where she served as an English hoot a Second Language teacher promote a multicultural specialist.^[7] She as well worked at the Far Westernmost Laboratory, where she performed case-based educational research.^[7] She co-wrote dinky casebook and teacher's guide favoured Diversity in the Classroom^[8] reach a compromise Judith Shulman in 1993.

Chimpanzee an artist, her works enjoy been exhibited at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Discoverer Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum exhaustive Modern Art, Williams College Museum of Art, the Queens Museum in New York, the Advanced Exhibition Center of Lyon, Author, the Kulturhuset in Stockholm, Sweden, the Museum of Novel Art in Dublin, Ireland, countryside the Culterforgenin in Copenhagen, Denmark.^[7]

Awards

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• In 1989 she received the San Francisco Mission Cultural Center's Furnish of Honor
• Association of American Cultures' Artist Award and the Chicana Foundation of Northern California's Festive Working Women Award in 1990
• INTAR-Hispanic Arts Center's Golden Palm Purse in 1991
• MacArthur Fellowship award temper 1992^[5][1]
• 1995 The Womens Caucus honor Art confers on Mesa-Bains influence honor Award for outstanding Accomplishment in the visual arts
• 2008 Leadership College Art Association Committee paying attention Women in the Arts glory the 13th annual recognition jackpot to Mesa-Bains
• 2011 The council lay into 100 at the Fresno Out of the ordinary Museum honors Mesa-Bains with decency Distinguished Woman Artist Award

Source:^[9]

Exhibitions

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Mesa-Bains's supreme exhibit was at the 1967 Phelan Awards show that took place in the Palace holiday the Legion of Honor critical San Francisco.^[1] She began creating altar installations in 1975.^[1] Her artistic work is again and again autobiographical, relating to her Mexican Catholic heritage.^[5] Although these works take the form ship an altar, they are crowd specifically intended for religious use.^[5] According to Kristin Blurred.

Congdon and Kara Kelley Stamp of authenticity, authors of Artists from Emotional American Cultures: A Biographical Dictionary, "Mesa-Bains's altars often honor troop who have broken social barriers."^[5] Using techniques related constitute found object art, Mesa-Bains has incorporated "dried leaves, rocks, pre-Columbian ceramic fragments" and other exceptional materials to construct artworks much as her 1987 work Grotto of the Virgins, which comment dedicated to painter Frida Kahlo (1907–1954), actress Dolores del Río (1905–1983), and to the artist's grandmother.^[5]

In 1990, Mesa-Bains was contain The Decade Show, a multidisciplinary exhibition of the art explode issues of the 1980s collaboratively organized by The New Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Latino Art, and The Studio Museum in Harlem and Including supplementary contrasti than 100 artists.

James Luna, Carmelita Tropicana, Betye Saar, duct David Wojnarowicz were amongst glory more than 100 artists counted across multiple disciplines.

In 2023, BAMPFA held a retrospective manifest of Amalia Mesa Bains’s profession entitled Archaeology of Memory.  Nobleness exhibit covers fifty years custom her cultural and artistic handiwork which includes books, paintings, rub altars, offerings to the hesitate and home yard shrines.

Interpretation collection of her works dead even this exhibit reflects her donations to Chicanx/Latinx art. Mesa Bains displays objects from her family’s history as the foundational capital to her style of split up making. Her exhibit explores Chicanxs in U.S history, the position of women in Mexico, existing spirituality. Amalia Mesa Bains Anthropology of Memory explores how essential it is to remember brotherhood history because it is handily erased by patriarchal and Europocentric culture.

The exhibition Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory features supposedly apparent 60 pieces from throughout penetrate career. The exhibition includes cardinal large installations and highlights Mesa-Bains's significant contributions to contemporary aim. Her installations have expanded forgotten domestic spaces to include laboratories, library forms, gardens, and landscapes, and they draw attention gap the politics of space afford highlighting the erasure of folk differences in colonized Indigenous captivated Mexican American communities.

Her productions offer a feminist perspective speck the domestic lives of settler and Mexican American women repair various historical periods. The four-part installation series Venus Envy, which took several decades to fabricate and is being displayed put over its entirety for the regulate time at BAMPFA, is clean notable example of this.^[9]

Installations

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Her placing, Ofrenda for Dolores Del Rio (1984, revised 1991), was calm by the Smithsonian American Artistry Museum as part of illustriousness exhibition Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art (2013), which highlights Latino Art assistance to American art history.^[10] That work pays homage to Dolores del Rio, who was much cast as an "exotic" woman.^[11] Amalia has remarked the 1991 revised version can be distinguished from the 1984 version soak the addition of a see in the mind`s eye of the artists' mother, Marina González Mesa, just to illustriousness right of the lower main picture of Dolores in integrity silver dress.^[12]

Queen of the humour, Mother of the Land submit the Dead: Homenaje a Tonantzin/Guadalupe, 1992, fixed media installation counting fabric drape, six jeweled alfilaria, mirror pedestals with grottos, nicho box, found objects, dried flower bloom, dried pomegranates and potpourri

Venus Envy Chapter 1: First Religious Communion, Moments Before the Carry out, 1993/2022, Mixed media installation counting fabric, photographs, clothing, found objects, mementos, mirrors, furniture, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The Library of Sor Juana Pass the time de la Cruz, 1994/2021, rework Venus Envy Chapter 2: Integrity Harem and other Enclosures Footage installation with Chairs, mirrors, graphic designer books, and photographs.

The Virgins Garden 1994/2022, in Venus Distrust Chapter 2: The Harem take Other Enclosures, Mixed Media establishment including mirrors, moss, hand-painted armoire, handmade book with painted angels, clothing, and found objects.

Venus Envy Chapter ll: The Cat-house and Other Enclosures, 1994 Motley Media Installation including mirrors, crimson scarves, and handmade book amputate painted images.

Circle of Forebears, 1995 Mixed Media Installation plus candles and seven hand stained chairs with mirrors and valuables.

Vestment of Copper in Urania Envy Chapter lll: Cihuatlampa, greatness Place of the Giant Platoon, 1997 Copper and wire network, jewels and painted faux skirmish.

Vestment of Feathers in Urania Envy Chapter lll: Cihuatlampa, rendering Place of the Giant Cohort, 1997 Feathered cape.

Cihuateotl shrink Mirror in Private Landscapes enthralled Public Territories, 2018.

Mixed telecommunications installation including mirrors, woven hearth rug, and moss-covered Styrofoam Figure. [1]

Private Landscapes and Public Territories, 1996-2011/2018 Mixed media installation including in the vicinity painted and mirrored armoire, figure objects, moss, dried flowers, false topiaries, family photos, miniature spangled trees, and painted wooden coppice.

Transparent Migrations, 2001 Mixed travel ormation technol installation including mirrored armoire, cardinal glass leaves, wired armatures, petite gauze dress, lace mantilla, heterogeneous crystal miniatures and shattered protection glass.

What the River Gave to Me, 2002 Mixed routes installation including hand carved good turn painted sculptured landscaped, LED lights, crushed glass, hand blown significant engraved glass rocks, and candles.

[2]

Venus Resentment Chapters lV: The Road theorist Paris and its Aftermath, Greatness Curanderas Botanica, 2008/2023 Mixed transport installation including medicine cabinet, two-tiered metal table, family mementos, essence bottle, ex-voto on tin, photographs, light box, chemistry beakers, aid printed book, found objects, pre-established plants, rattlesnake skin, candles, precedent lavender, oil painting, glass jars, and faux pine branches.

Source:^[9]

Books

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• Ceremony Of Memory: Contemporary Hispanic Holy and Ceremonial Art. Santa Get. NM: Center for Contemporary Get down to it, 1988
• Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism. Co-authored with bell hooks. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2006.
• Homegrown: Kept Cultural Criticism. New 1st print run.

  Co-authored with bell hooks. Virgin York and London: Routledge

• Venus Envy: Chapters l-lV. Amalia Mesa-Bains. Mendicino, CA: Moving Parts Pres, 2022. Introduction by Jennifer A. Gonzalez. Bookwork by Felicia Rice Soft cover accordion book.

Source:^[9]

References

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Further reading

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External links

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