12 Facts About Amalia Mesa-Bains

Amalia Mesa-Bains is best known for her large-scale installations that reference home altars and ofrendas.

Amalia Mesa-Bains's work engages in a conceptual exploration of Mexican American women's spiritual practices that addresses colonial and imperial histories of display, the recovery of cultural memory, and their roles in identity formation.

Amalia Mesa-Bains then worked for the San Francisco Unified School District as a psychologist.

Amalia Mesa-Bains was the regional committee chair for the exhibition Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation.

Amalia Mesa-Bains has written Ceremony of Spirit: Nature and Memory in Contemporary Latino Art.

Amalia Mesa-Bains worked at the Far West Laboratory, where she performed case-based educational research.

Amalia Mesa-Bains co-wrote a casebook and teacher's guide entitled Diversity in the Classroom with Judith Shulman in 1993.

In 1990, Amalia Mesa-Bains was in The Decade Show, a multidisciplinary exhibition of the art and issues of the 1980s collaboratively organized by The New Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, and The Studio Museum in Harlem and Including more than 100 artists.

Amalia Mesa-Bains's exhibit explores Chicanxs in UShistory, the role of women in Mexico, and spirituality.

Amalia Mesa-Bains's installations have expanded beyond domestic spaces to include laboratories, library forms, gardens, and landscapes, and they draw attention to the politics of space by highlighting the erasure of cultural differences in colonized Indigenous and Mexican American communities.

Amalia Mesa-Bains's works offer a feminist perspective on the domestic lives of immigrant and Mexican American women across various historical periods.

Amalia Mesa-Bains has remarked the 1991 revised version can be differentiated from the 1984 version by the addition of a picture of the artists' mother, Marina Gonzalez Mesa, just to the right of the lower central picture of Dolores in the silver dress.