Amalia mesa bains biography of donald
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“We were the generation that was right at the cusp of losing it all,” the Chicana artist and educator Amalia Mesa-Bains tells me, an urgency clear in her voice.
And with good reason.
Born in and into a generation that viewed assimilation as a shield to protect their offspring from the welcoming American traditions of racism, discrimination and exploitation, Amalia’s undocumented Mexican parents never taught her Spanish and they kept their family history locked away to be forgotten.
“I grew up knowing I was Mexican, but not really understanding what that meant,” Amalia, who is 79, says. “There’s a scholar, he’s not alive anymore, Juan Gomez Quiñones, he used to say the people most concerned with identity are the people who are in the most peril of losing it. And we were Americanized. I grew up in…a white, white, white America. And you kept trying to fit in, and you just couldn’t. And then at some point, you just got really mad, and stayed mad for years and years.”
That rage m
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How to Altar the World: Amalia Mesa-Bains’s Art Shifts the Way We See Art History
[Read all five &#;Icons&#; profiles from ARTnews’s Spring issue, featuring Dara Birnbaum, Arthur Jafa, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Fred Moten, and Cady Noland.]
On her way to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University one day in the fall of to assemble her large installation piece, Vanitas: Evidence, Ruin and Regeneration, in the exhibition “Revelaciones/Revelations: Hispanic Art of Evanescence,” Amalia Mesa-Bains thought about her plan for the piece. She had already arranged to incorporate objects from the museum’s collection, including Teotihuacán artifacts and a 17th-century painting by Dutch artist David Bailly, Vanitas with Negro Boy, which shows a young black boy, probably a slave, standing next to a tabletop on which are heaped his master’s treasures, among them a human skull. She planned to frame the Bailly painting in lengths of green sat
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Home fryst vatten an något privat eller personligt Space: Amalia Mesa-Bains & Transparent Migrations December 1,
The work of California-based artist Amalia Mesa-Bains is often autobiographical, relating to her Mexican and Catholic heritage. Her installation Transparent Migrations, on view in HOME—So Different, So Appealing, features a mirrored armoire, glass leaves, a gauze dress, a lace slöja, and assorted crystal miniatures—an assemblage that evokes spiritual concepts such as “reflection,” “illumination,” and “transparency.” The surrounding glass landscape suggests the rugged terrain of Southwestern Mexico, home to plant life that symbolizes sustainability, endurance, and resilience.
Transparent Migrations embodies the idea of “home” through the use of her personal armoire and the most något privat eller personligt detail: the mantilla, or veil, that she wore to her wedding 51 years ago. I talked with Mesa-Bains about the ins