And it is a disquieting work: a golden throne, the seat of conquest, upholstered with bits of literal bodies. The cabinet is not part of the Berkeley retrospective, but “The Autopsy Chair” is included. Placed next to the cabinet was a Louis XIV-style armchair that the artist had bathed in gold paint and then stabbed repeatedly, stuffing its wounds with her own hair and that of fellow Chicanas. It contained a cabinet - evocative of Victorian-era curiosity cabinets - that featured arrangements of pre-Columbian-style figurines and shards of pottery alongside disconcerting medical instruments and tools of restraint. Artspace (now the Phoenix Institute of Contemporary Art) that challenged romantic ideas about the settlement of the Americas. Two years before that anniversary, Mesa-Bains presented a room-size installation at Phoenix’s M.A.R.S. Both have also tackled, in distinct ways, myriad issues around Indigeneity - countering, for instance, the celebratory approach taken by many institutions toward the 1992 quincentennial of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas. And both have created works inspired by mapping, questioning how the borders of the United States have overwritten what was here before.

The show reunites nearly 60 works, including many of her sprawling altar-style installations inspired by themes of family, spiritual rite, the feminine body and politics.īoth artists have talked about feeling disillusioned with and excluded by the second wave feminist movement of the 1970s.

Memory is at the heart of a pair of captivating and long-overdue exhibitions currently on view on opposite coasts.Īt the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Mesa-Bains - an artist as well as an important scholar - is the subject of a career retrospective - her first. She goes on to refer to a well-known quote by Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel: “You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives.

“Memory allows us to resist and to heal,” says hooks. Mesa-Bains, a mestiza Chicana from the Bay Area, and hooks, a Black woman from Kentucky, devote a chapter to memory. The book that emerged, “ Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism,” is marvelous for its thoughtfulness and its accessibility, exploring the roots of culture, how it is generated but also how it can be suppressed and erased. Instead, the pair sat down and had a series of conversations. When theorists Amalia Mesa-Bains and bell hooks got together to write a book in 2017, they didn’t produce a collection of essays or some scholarly manifesto.

Grateful dead 1992 space