April 20, 2023
American Sign Language Guided Tour of Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory
Saturday, April 29th, 1:30 PM
Patricia Lessard offers American Sign Language interpretation for a graduate student-led tour of the exhibition. Lessard is a specialist in ASL interpretation of visual art. All visitors are welcome.
Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory is the first retrospective exhibition of longtime Bay Area artist Mesa-Bains. Including fourteen major installations, this exhibition celebrates her important contributions to the field of contemporary art locally and globally.
For over forty-five years, Mesa-Bains has worked to bring Chicana art into the broader American field of contemporary art through innovations of sacred forms such as altares (home altars), ofrendas (offerings to the dead), descansos (roadside resting places), and capillas (home yard shrines). She expanded her installations from domestic spaces to include laboratories, library forms, gardens, and landscapes, highlighting colonial erasure of the preexisting and still-surviving cultural differences in colonized Indigenous and Mexican American communities. Many of these works offer a feminist perspective on the domestic life of immigrant and Mexican American women across different historical periods––most notably the four-part installation series Venus Envy, which was created over multiple decades and is on display in its entirety for the first time at BAMPFA.
Find information about visiting BAMPFA at bampfa.org.