Amalia Mesa-Bains is the 2024 recipient of AAR’s Religion and the Arts Award. A visual artist, writer, and educator, Mesa-Bains has reconceived how we think about Chicano and Latino art through works that explore ongoing histories of spirituality, colonialism, and gender. “We are thrilled to honor Amalia Mesa-Bains with this year’s award,” said Anthony Petro, chair of the Religion and the Arts Award Jury. “Throughout her amazing career, and in her continuing artistic and writing practice, Mesa-Bains explores themes and questions of spirituality, politics, and aesthetics that exemplify the American Academy of Religion’s commitment to expanding public knowledge about religion.”
Mesa-Bains is most well known for her ofrendas, large-scale installation pieces that draw upon the Mexican tradition of creating altars for the Day of the Dead to commemorate relatives and ancestors. Art critic Maximilíano Durón described her installations as “sacred spaces imbued with memory: of the dead, of history and all its atrocities, of innocence lost, of the mystical and mythological.” Mesa-Bain’s work has explored the spiritual practices and politics of Mexican American women in particular, including histories of colonialism as well as sites for fostering Chicana feminism.
Mesa-Bains’ work has been exhibited at many major museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. El Museo del Barrio in New York City will be exhibiting Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory, the artist’s first retrospective, until September 20, upon which time it will move to the San Antonio Museum of Art.
In addition to her artistic work, Mesa-Bains has authored several notable books and articles, including Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism (South End Press, 2006), which features conversations between Mesa-Bains and bell hooks about Black and Latinx art, identity, and politics. Her 1999 essay “Domesticana: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache,” which appeared in Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, builds upon Tomás Ybarra-Frausto’s writing on rasquachismo to theorize the artistic contributions of women to Chicano art.
Mesa-Bains has received numerous awards during her career, including a MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 1992. She earned a B.A. in painting at San Jose State University, an M.A. in interdisciplinary education from San Francisco State University, and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the Wright Institute in Berkeley. She worked for two decades for the San Francisco Unified School Network as a teacher of ESL and multicultural education and as a project manager for Consent Decree Staff Development. In 1993, she received the University of California Regents Professorship and from 1997-2014 directed the Institute for Visual & Public Art at California State University, Monterey Bay.