In the second half of the 20th century, many artists turned towards their life experiences to explore both their own histories and those of their communities. For women artists and artists of color whose work has too often been neglected by exhibiting and collecting institutions, using their own lives as subject matter has been a way to declare their stories and those of their communities as worthy of attention and respect.
Amalia Mesa-Bains, Venus Envy, Chapter I: The First Holy Communion Moments Before the End, 1993, mixed-media installation (installed at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2022; photo: Katherine du Tiel) © Amalia Mesa-Bains
Autobiographical installation
The large and complex installation Venus Envy, developed by Chicana artist Amalia Mesa-Bains starting in 1993, occupies the space of four full rooms when presented in its entirety. [1] Each room, titled a “chapter,” holds a variety of objects and images appropriate to the spaces evoked: bridal boudoir, convent study, harem, mythological land of giant women, and a laboratory or medical office. The installation combines Mesa-Bains’s own life with communal experiences in women’s lives.
With a title that puns on Sigmund Freud’s “penis envy,” Mesa-Bains’s Venus Envy traces possible life stages for a Chicana woman. Fittingly, it was realized over time. The first chapter installation debuted in 1993 at the Whitney Museum, the second in 1994 at Williams College Museum of Art, the third in 1997 at the Kraus Gallery, and the fourth in 2008 at the Menil Collection. Recently, and for the first time, all four chapters were installed together for the traveling exhibition Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory. A sense of time pervades Venus Envy. Ordinary everyday objects collected from life—family photographs, a rosary, figurines, and trinkets—proliferate on tables, inside display cases, and even on the floor by visitors’ feet. The free exuberant display found in Mesa-Bains’s work and that of other Chicanx artists has been termed “rasquachismo” by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto. Mesa-Bains has used the term “domesticana,” to underscore the domestic and feminist aspects of her artistic practice. Mesa-Bains’s earliest work took the form of home altars called ofrendas. Though Catholicism, a patriarchal religion, is dominated by an all-male priesthood, home altars are often created and cared for by women. Starting in the 1970s Mesa-Bains made many ofrenda installations that combined secular and sacred objects, much like the ones her grandmother kept. [2]
Amalia Mesa-Bains, Chapter II: The Harem and Other Enclosures, 1994, mixed-media installation (owned by Williams College Museum of Art, installed at El Museo del Barrio, 2024; photo: Matthew Sherman) © Amalia Mesa-Bains
Centering Chicana experience
The ofrenda follows Mesa-Bains’s life and the Chicana experience throughout Venus Envy, taking the form of a vanity table in Chapter I, a writing desk and a green armoire with open doors in Chapter II, a woman made of moss with a mirror in Chapter III, and a stainless-steel laboratory table in Chapter IV. The abundance of items assembled in a haphazard collection make deliberate reference to early modern European “cabinets of curiosities” or Wunderkammern. In these cabinets, Europeans from the 15th century on collected objects often from around the world as “curiosities” to be displayed and admired. Mesa-Bains connects their construction of “the Other” directly to anthropology and ethnography museums, e.g. “Hall of Man” exhibitions, that constructed not just the Other, but its shadow, “the Western Man.” [3] Mesa-Bains’s insistence on respect for the Chicana experience and historical contextualization can be understood as decolonial, rejecting a Eurocentric story. [4]
Amalia Mesa-Bains was born to undocumented Mexican parents in 1943 in Santa Clara, California when the area was still an agricultural community. Childhood desires for assimilation and belonging with California’s white community ended with the realization that such dreams were unachievable. “I used to terrorize my mother to wear a certain kind of Donna Reed apron instead of her little cotton housecoat because I wanted her to be American,” Mesa-Bains said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. “Then as my childhood and early adolescence unfolded, I realized nope, nobody’s being fooled, you are not American in their eyes.” [5]
Chicana awakening occurred at San José State University where she earned a bachelor’s degree in painting in 1966. There Mesa-Bains encountered the Chicano Movement and saw Chicano playwright Luis Valdez’s first full-length play “The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa” produced on campus in 1963. Mesa-Bains later said, “He scared the living daylights out of me because up until that point I was trying really hard to be white.” [6]
Mesa-Bains started exploring the Chicana experience both as an artist and as a scholar. She earned an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Education at San Francisco State University followed by an M.A. in 1980 and Ph.D. in 1983 in Clinical Psychology from the Wright Institute. With its elaborate intimate spaces of a Chicana woman’s life, Venus Envy presents the psychological depth and complications of womanhood over time.
Ofrenda on the vanity (details), Amalia Mesa-Bains, Venus Envy, Chapter I: The First Holy Communion Moments Before the End, 1993, mixed-media installation (installed at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2022; photo: Katherine du Tiel) © Amalia Mesa-Bains
Venus Envy’s four chapters
Archetypes of the bride, the Catholic Virgin Mary, and the Mexica (Aztec) goddess Coatlicue populate Chapter I: The First Holy Communion Moments Before the End. Mesa-Bains’s own First Communion dress from her childhood can be found in a vitrine echoing the bride’s white bouquet that lies on a satin-wrapped chair. Figurines of the Virgin Mary can be found among the perfume bottles, family photos, and pearls adorning the dressing table, but when the bride looks in the mirror, her visage will be reflected through an image of Coatlicue.
Amalia Mesa-Bains, Chapter II: The Harem and Other Enclosures, 1994, mixed-media installation (owned by Williams College Museum of Art, installed at El Museo del Barrio, 2024; photo: Matthew Sherman) © Amalia Mesa-Bains
Chapter II: The Harem and Other Enclosures suggests three locations in which women claimed freedom for themselves in homosocial spaces despite restrictions placed upon women’s lives in their societies. “Sor Juana’s Library” imagines the study of the celebrated 17th-century Mexican scholar, poet, and nun who argued for women’s intellectual rights. The Bishop of Puebla eventually confiscated her books and scientific equipment after objecting to Sor Juana’s unabashed feminist writing that criticized sexism and misogyny. In the installation, that has yet to happen. Scientific instruments, photographs, candlesticks, and a receipt paper detailing varies statistics occupy the desk. In the 2023 iteration, the receipt paper tracked the Latino populations of major U.S. cities, the states with highest Latino populations, Latino percentage of U.S. prison population, and Latino COVID-19 deaths.
A harem and a European garden add two more full vignettes to Chapter II. A harem, household quarters exclusively for women, jointly restricts the movements of women while providing a space relatively free of patriarchal dominance. Colored window panels suggest a rich life inside. The “Virgin’s Garden” plays on the Christian idea of the hortus conclusus, the “closed garden” as an analogy for virginity. Among green moss, trees, and ever more trinkets, the green armoire reflects the visitor through an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe (like the Coatlicue in Chapter I), emblazoned on its mirrored door.
Amalia Mesa-Bains, Chapter III: Cihuatlampa, the Place of the Giant Women, 1997, mixed-media installation (owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, installed at El Museo del Barrio, 2024; photo: Matthew Sherman) © Amalia Mesa-Bains
For Chapter III: Cihuatlampa, the Place of the Giant Women, Mesa-Bains envisioned the Mexica mythical land of women who had died in childbirth—considered equal to warriors who died in battle. A verdant woman sprawls recumbent on a floor of mosses and natural growth while regarding herself in a mirror on the gallery floor. Like the mirrors of Chapters I and II, her visage is reflected through an archetype, this time the Virgin of Montserrat, a Black Virgin Mary iteration. Mesa-Bains sees the Virgin connected to the Indigenous Tonantzin mother goddess. A giant copper tunic and feather vestment hang nearby for the giant women. Images of the artist’s mother, female Catholic figures, and Mexica deities can be found on the wall.
Amalia Mesa-Bains, Venus Envy Chapter IV: The Road to Paris and Its Aftermath, The Curandera’s Botanica, 2008, mixed media installation (owned by the National Gallery of Art, installed at The Menil Collection, 2008) © Amalia Mesa-Bains
Chapter IV: The Road to Paris and Its Aftermath, The Curandera’s Botanica, joined Venus Envy in 2008, five years after a near-fatal car accident that broke Mesa-Bains’s neck, leg, and arm. The antiseptic metal chest and table hold glass jars, family mementos, and a wealth of dried medicinal plants used by a curandera, a traditional Mexican healer. A portrait of Mesa-Bains’s grandmother, Mariana Escobedo Mesa, herself a curandera, glows in a light box mounted on the wall.
By weaving her own life history with Mexican history, and women’s history, Mesa-Bains invites the viewer to see themselves as an individual connected to larger histories of struggle, community, and the constant urge for self-determination. She rejects Eurocentric narratives that claim universality, but ignore the lives of women and people of color. With specificity and numerous tactile objects, the artist insists on an attentive, full history outside the exoticism of the cabinet of curiosities.
