Art Talk: Amalia Mesa-Bains
Saturday, November 4, 2023 | 1 pm
Presented in Whiteman Hall. Limited capacity.
TICKETS: Free for Members | Included with general admission for the general public
* Ticket for this event includes General Admission to the Museum
Artist, activist, and scholar Amalia Mesa-Bains has produced a powerful body of artistic work and aesthetic thought that has worked to help define a Chicana/o/x, LatinX, and Latin American aesthetic in the United States and Latin America. Hear from Mesa-Bains about her life, art, and creative vision in conversation with Director Emerita of El Museo del Barrio Susana Torruella Leval and Phoenix Art Museum Assistant Curator of Contemporary and Community Art Initiatives Christian Ramírez.
About the Speakers:
Amalia Mesa-Bains:
Born in 1943 in Santa Clara, California, to immigrant parents, Amalia Mesa-Bains is an artist, activist, educator, and scholar who has explored the experiences, spiritual practices, and histories of Mexican American women. In the mid-1970s, she first innovated with sacred forms such as altares (home altars), ofrendas (offerings to the dead), and descansos (roadside resting places), which are rooted in Mexican Indigenous traditions of honoring familial ancestors. These works—now considered her signature altar-installations—also honor the memories of the artist’s cultural predecessors, including Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Santa Teresa de Ávila, Frida Kahlo, and other women whose lives defied the societal norms and expectations of their time. Mesa-Bains eventually expanded her approach to installation to explore more public environments such as laboratories, libraries, gardens, and landscapes, which her work continues to consider today.
The artist’s collective body of work offers an archeological examination into the politics of space, highlighting the complexities of domestic life for immigrant and Mexican American women across different historical periods. Mesa-Bains also explores the many ways colonial narratives erase Mexican, African American, and Indigenous identities from mainstream American media and culture. Through her practice, the artist has blazed a trail for feminist Chicanx art, bringing it to wider global audiences and carving a place for it more broadly within the history of contemporary American art.
Susana Torruella Level:
Director Emerita and former chief curator of El Museo del Barrio, Susana Torruella Leval has worked as an art writer and curator of Puerto Rican, Latino, and Latin American contemporary art in New York City for more than 50 years. She has also served as chair of the Cultural Institutions Group and as vice president and president-elect of the Association of Art Museum Directors. She has taught in various capacities at The Cooper Union, New York University, Bard College, and Hunter College. Her volunteer leadership roles include serving on the Board of Trustees for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Academy in Rome, the Alliance for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Brooklyn Museum, among others. Since the mid-1980s, she has served as a panelist for different programs of the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Torruella Leval earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history from Manhattanville College and a Master of Arts degree from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
Christian Ramírez:
Christian Ramírez is the Assistant Curator of Contemporary and Community Art Initiatives at Phoenix Art Museum. In this role, she manages the institution’s Arizona Artist Awards programs and curates exhibitions of work by annual recipients, organizes exhibitions of contemporary art drawn from the Museum’s contemporary art collection, and fosters deepened relationships with regional and Arizona-based artists to curate exhibitions that elevate their work among statewide and national audiences. Ramírez also serves as the liaison for artists presented to the community through the Museum’s semiannual Lenhardt Lectures. Ramírez has more than a decade of experience in the arts, working previously at MOCA Tucson (2011-2016) and as the Residency and Exhibitions Manager at Artpace San Antonio (2021-2022). In 2016, she co-founded Everybody, a curatorial project currently based in Tucson, Arizona, that organized the exhibition Henry Codax (2017), participated in NADA New York showing Elliott Jamal Robbins and Casey Jargo (2018), and received the 2021 Night Bloom Grant, organized by MOCA Tucson in partnership with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Ramírez has sat on jury panels for the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Grand Canyon Conservancy, and CALA Alliance. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she worked with Museum Workers Speak to raise $100,000 over eight months as part of a mutual-aid effort to provide cash relief to 200 museum workers who were adversely affected by COVID-19.