The Brooklyn Rail

Contemporary artist and cultural critic Amalia Mesa-Bains’s retrospective at El Museo del Barrio, aptly titled Archaeology of Memory and on view through August 11, documents Chicana histories, whether anecdotal, geographic, political, or cultural. The exhibition encompasses over thirty years of the artist’s manuscripts, photomontages, sculptures, installations, and research. It is large in scale and yet deeply intimate.

In this show, Mesa-Bains uses the ephemeral images created by mirrors to amalgamate past and present. Her elaborate room installation Venus Envy Chapter I: First Holy Communion, Moments Before the End (1993/2022), for instance, prominently features a wall of individual mirrors, each etched with a photograph. Mesa-Bains intentionally overlaps these images—which range from Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s The Ecstasy of St. Teresa (1645–52) to a vintage photograph of the artist’s mother—with the viewer’s own likeness as they approach for a closer look. The effect is otherworldly, with the images’ messy edges recalling daguerreotypes or the grimy surfaces of folkloric “cursed” mirrors. Initially, the works come across as an unsettling marriage of the viewer’s static face and the artist’s intangible memories. However, Mesa-Bains’s incorporation of the audience’s reflection, something which we largely take for granted as consistent, transforms the mirror into nebulous pathways between and around the artistic sources she draws upon.

Mesa-Bains’s 1999 essay “‘Domesticana’: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache” implements the terms “rasquache” and its feminist denomination, “domesticana,” to describe a distinctively hybrid form of cultural resistance rooted in collective experiences of the Mexican diaspora. Mesa-Bains distinguishes rasquache/domesticana from “kitsch,” arguing that while both strategies entail the emulation and elevation of pop aesthetics to high art, kitsch is a practice distinct from the artist’s worldview while rasquache/domesticana is an embodiment of the artist’s lived experiences and a shared Chicanx cultural identity. Mesa-Bains’s 1992 installation Queen of the Waters, Mother of the Land of the Dead: Homenaje a Tontazin/Guadalupe, for instance, features votive candles, plaster figurines of the Madonna, tarot cards, plastic fruits coated in metallic spray paint, and ceramic sugar skulls, all mass-produced commodities. Mesa-Bains’s reimagination of these objects as a decolonialized altarpiece endows them with a significance that extends beyond her appropriation of these ready-made items.

Mesa-Bains also harnesses domesticana to examine and question the histories codified by academic art history. Her Harem Mirrors (1994), for instance, superimpose nineteenth-century European paintings of imagined Middle Eastern scenes onto reflections which, coupled with colorful scarves draped across their frames to mimic boudoir curtains, transport the viewer into the exoticized fantasy narratives of Western Orientalism. Similarly, her mossy Cihuateotl with Mirror sculpture (1997/2018) gazes into a mirror obscured by the superimposed image of a Black Madonna, juxtaposing Aztec mythology with Christian theology. Mesa-Bains’s transformation of mirrored surfaces guides the viewer through the Eurocentric undercurrents of a Western art history that she asserts is simplified to the point of reductive caricature.

Referring back to her essay, Mesa-Bains posits that rasquache and domesticana art reference popular culture and recontextualize mass-produced materials to immortalize the artist’s identities, drafting what she refers to as an “anecdotal” Chicano history that is both newly-formed and emblematic of centuries of shared political and cultural history. She then invokes Walter Benjamin’s argument that “anecdote brings things closer to us in space.… represent[ing] the extreme opposite of History” to entrench rasquache and domesticana art as a form of resistance against academic and archival institutions’ exclusion of anecdotal histories. We see Mesa-Bains engaging with similar themes in Archaeology of Memory, particularly through her Tree of Life (2011). The digital photocollage of an Indigenous Central American (or Nahua) family and a tree’s extending branches forms a literal family tree, with the figures serving as its roots and the branches signifying the family’s growth for generations to come. She overlays this image with Benjamin’s attestation of the “weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.” Mesa-Bains’s juxtaposition of her genealogical map with Benjamin’s quote centers a thriving multigenerational family as an exemplar of anecdotal history.

Mesa-Bains fulfills the task of concretizing the present to form an anecdotal domesticana history, and thus challenging hegemonic systems and repositories of knowledge, in Codex Amalia (1991), a collaged manuscript “conceptual map” detailing Mesa-Bains’s own childhood, family, and Mexican Indigenous and Catholic influences. The work also features a reflective surface—a miniscule mirror peeking from behind an overlapping sheet of paper. Here, she strategically obscures the viewer’s reflection, fragmenting it in a way that is only noticeable by meticulously parsing through the Codex’s many segments. Mesa-Bains integrates the viewer’s horizontal movement as they gaze from left to right, calling attention to the viewer’s participation in her artistic journey as both a witness to her creative development and an active agent in concretizing her legacy.