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Analia Mesa-Bains
Mesa-Bains has been a featured artist in many exhibitions, including Ceremony of Memory: New Expressions of Spirituality Among Contemporary Hispanic Artists at the Center for Contemporary Arts of Santa Fe in 1988 and Decolonizing Chicana Art: The Work of Santa C. Barraza, Amaila Mesa-Bains, and Alma Lopez at California State University Long Beach in 2014. A 2013 Exhibition at the Contemporary Latina @ Broadsides Project at the Museo Eduardo Carrilo & Pajoar Valley Arts in Santa Cruz featured her installation, New World Wunderkammer. Described by the artist as a cabinet designed to hold objects selected from the Fowler Collection, the wunderkammer integrated her family images and objects along with eight digital prints referring to cultural narratives of the artifacts. The artist’s interest in the intersection between cultural history, her own family history, and her concern for social justice can be viewed in her series of ofrenda or home altars. These altars are sometimes built by the men of the family but are furnished by the women of the family. These sites in the home are records of the family’s history, both spiritual and quotidian, as women maintain the memory of the group. Mesa-Bains creates artistic versions of these home altars but her ofrendas are temporary and site specific. Related to the catholic tradition in Mexico, The Day of the Dead, Día de los Muertos, the altars allow the family to pause and pay tribute to those who have passed on. Family members pray and act out their memories of the absent relatives. Among her best-known altars are homages to Dolores Del Rio and Frida Kahlo both of whom were bi-cultural. The stories of the actor and the artist, both from the 1940s, are recovered and celebrated as feminist Latina heroes by Mesa-Bains.