Amalia Mesa-Bains Av Laura E. Perez, Maria Esther Fernandez

This first major retrospective of Amalia Mesa-Bains unearths her significant contributions to Chicanx/Latinx art and feminism. Best known for her pioneering altar installations, Amalia Mesa-Bains is one of the most innovative feminist and Latinx artists of her generation. In her¿forty-year career as an artist, activist, educator, and scholar, she has explored the¿experiences, spiritual practices, and histories of Mexican American women and¿addressed the colonial erasure and recovery of Mexican, African American, and¿Indigenous Californians. Appropriately called an "archaeological" practice, Mesa-Bains's art creates sacred spaces imbued with cultural memory, leading viewers on a¿magical journey of discovery through what might otherwise be lost to existing canons of¿history. Amalia Mesa-Bains: The Archaeology of Memory¿is the exhibition catalog accompanying the first major retrospective of her work, bringing her installations from the 1970s to¿the present together for the first time. Fea