The Brooklyn Rail

This long-overdue first retrospective by an eighty-year-old Chicana artist is one of the stellar events of the season. Many East Coast viewers are unaware that Mexican history, in former territories like New Mexico, predates the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock (1620). Archaeologists posit that it may pre-date the conquistadors, reaching back to Mesoamerica. Mesa-Bains, the daughter of an undocumented Mexican agricultural worker and a maid traverses a timeline, cultural panorama, and personal history that extends from cannery worker to MacArthur Genius grantee. She is an artist, educator, curator, cultural historian, and champion of Latinx and Latina artists. Mesa-Bains is a giantess worthy of donning the ceiling-height feather and copper vestments dedicated to Cihuateteo (Aztec goddesses representing women who had died in childbirth) we see in this exhibition. As she said herself, “And so my joke was always that I never had children, but I decided I would still be a Cihuatlampa person, my own Cihuateotl.” The artist’s life-work has placed her in the pantheon of her work Cihuatlampa, The Place of the Giant Women (1997). Her progeny has been the creation of a monumental legacy in the service of a community of women who had formerly had little visibility. Although Mesa-Bains’s healing artistic vision is rooted in the Latinx world, what she brings benefits a much larger demographic, including spiritually starved New Yorkers.

Works from Venus Envy Chapter 1: First Holy Communion, Moments Before the End (1993/and restaged in 2022) fill the first room of the exhibition. A wall text presents the prevailing view: “how the convent and the rituals of First Holy Communion and marriage limit the roles available to Catholic Mexican girls.” Many of us Catholic women have railed against the church patriarchy, including Mesa-Bains in her writing. Yet, to belittle this sacrament with only a diatribe against limitation and the patriarchy robs it of other, deeper meanings and significance. This mini-marriage in white dress and veil celebrates the miracle of transubstantiation, and is a powerful rite of initiation. Dazzled by the white dress and lace topped socks, Mesa-Bains regarded it as a formative moment connecting her to her mother and female relatives. Such rites have their roots in antiquity going back to the Vestal Virgins who kept the sacred flame burning in the hearth of the Goddess Vesta and link us to the divine. In a vitrine lays a large Madonna with obscured face wearing vestments and a resplendor (a crown denoting divinity). Here we witness a radical departure. The Madonna is holding is not the traditional Christ child but a female infant also wearing a crown. The Mother of God has produced a divine female child. This First Communion feels like the entrance into an expanded archetype and an enlarged pantheon of feminine possibilities. The title’s “Venus Envy” references Venus Aphrodite, the missing erotic aspect of the Virgin Mary. A dressing table altar strewn with mementos and mirabilia (religious objects) like Virgin Mary statues, has a mirror with an embedded image of the goddess Coatlicue further expanding the archetype of feminine possibilities.

We see hints of this in the first room’s wall installation with ten mirrors featuring embedded images of Mesoamerican goddesses, women warriors, and Mexican film stars. The mirror can be a portal into the unconscious. In Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphée, Orpheus passes through a mirror of memories en route to the underworld. The many mirrors featured in this exhibition have a similar function. Our reflection passes through the mirror’s embedded images of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Aztec goddesses, and even odalisques, as we enter into ancestral, spiritual, and psychological dimensions. It is no accident that the artist has a PhD in clinical psychology, and her explorations begin with reflections rooted in her own life and tradition.

In her groundbreaking 1995 essay “Domesticana: the Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache,” Mesa-Bains contrasts Tomás Ybarra-Frausto’s rasquachismo (a term applying to Chicano artists making the most with what they had) to domesticana (Chicana artists working from the domestic sphere). Women’s work had an artistic component and was included in this domesticana feminism. Carmen Hermo and Mesa-Bains differentiate this from “white feminism.” I would argue that there were also many white Catholic women like myself who loved sewing class and novenas, who could also not relate to Betty Friedan. The Latinx domestic sphere here is a wellspring for the arts. The Mexican anthropologist Marta Turok has written about the Mayan meanings handwoven into cloth by generations of women. Domesticana builds on this antecedent.

A desk installation, The Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, (1994/2021), celebrates Mexico’s first feminist, polymath, theologian, writer, philosopher, composer and poet of the Baroque period. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (born 1648) authored Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz (Reply to Sister Filotea of the Cross), the first proto-feminist manifesto in the colonial Americas. This genius nun had amassed a library of four thousand books, but when she ran afoul of the church fathers, her library was confiscated, and she was banned from her intellectual pursuits. She died at the age of forty-six while caring for other nuns during an epidemic. New Yorkers seeing the monumental twenty-eight-foot painting from the Cathedral of Puebla, Moses and the Brazen Serpent and the Transfiguration of Jesus (1683), by the Mexican artist Cristóbal de Villalpando at the Metropolitan Museum in 2017, were made aware that the Baroque history of Mexico eclipsed anything existing in our colonial United States at that time. We have no feminist comparable in scope to this Mexican nun.

A medical cabinet, autopsy tables, amulets, mementos, and medical paraphernalia form the installation Venus Envy Chapter IV: The Road to Paris and Its Aftermath, The Curandera’s Botanica, (2008/2023). Following a near-fatal accident in Paris in 2003 the artist turned to familial and ancestral traditions of holistic spiritual healing practices. Her long healing came about by summoning ancestral spirits, combined with modern medicine. There is something moving about the authenticity of Mesa-Bains’s work born of actual practice, not theory. The monumental legacy of Mesa-Bains feels rooted in agricultural and spiritual traditions that have long been excluded from the mainstream art world. This short review is inadequate to encapsulate this first retrospective by such an important artist. A trip to El Museo del Barrio is highly recommended to see this landmark exhibition, curated by Maria Esther Fernández and Laura E. Pérez, that originated at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. The galleries feel haunted by the spirits of agricultural workers, cultural icons, saints, and indigenous goddesses. This viewer longed for a companion library to decipher each mysterious codex and longed for hours to read the prodigious writing by the artist. Mesa-Bains’s contribution staggers in its enormity.