When you step into the “Archaeology of Memory” exhibit by Chicana artist, curator and theorist Amalia Mesa-Bains at The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture (The Cheech) in downtown Riverside, you are transported into a realm of layered memories, filled with familiar scents, rich textures and intimate images. Each detail evokes beloved, distant times, carrying the emotional weight and cultural essence of identity.
“I am concerned with memory, because it’s functional to me. It’s a bridge between the living and the dead, between the past and the present, […] I see memory as this thread that keeps linking us together…,” expressed the artist in the video “Amalia Mesa-Bains: In Her Own Worlds”, which is on display in the show.
In the 1970s, Mesa-Bains began her journey at Galería de la Raza in San Francisco, where she organized and created Día de Muertos ofrendas under the mentorship of renowned Oaxacan artist Yolanda Garfias Woo. At the time, Día de Muertos held an especially powerful cultural significance for Chicanos. It became a vehicle for cultural expression during the height of the Chicano civil rights movement…