Starting at Home

John Haber
in New York City

Amalia Mesa-Bains and Domesticanx

Flow States: La Trienal 2024

Can a Chicana's thoughts on domesticity spark a revolution? Amalia Mesa-Bains and "Domesticanx" demand change starting at home.

Mesa-Bains does not need to be at home to remember. Her family is from Mexico, and she has been collecting fragments of a life for decades now. The lives in her art go back deeper still. "Archaeology of Memory" is at once a retrospective, a family history, and a tradition. A year earlier, "Domesticanx" saw what traditionalists might call a woman's world as a collective effort. Her solo show, too, holds both personal and collective memories, and at age eighty she is still digging.

Her concluding work at El Museo del Barrio is no more than a circle of chairs, laden with shiny fragments. It is her Circle of Ancestors, but she leaves it to you to imagine them as people. The tchotchkes would make for uncomfortable seating for anyone. The circle facing inward, toward candles on the floor, could assert her place or exclude her—just as, she implies, the art scene and the United States have turned their backs on Mexican American women like her. She claims the memories as hers all the same. For so obsessive a collector, the claim will always be a work in progress.

And oh, no, not another biennial or triennial. What could conceivably make the latest any different? It is "Flow States," La Trienal 2024. Will it just go with the flow? Or can it, like Mesa-Bains, find a permanent home? North of museum mile, can it put the hype surrounding ever-present group shows to shame?

A museum like this one dedicated to the Americas in New York has a ready answer. It is all about cultural difference—and the borders meant to keep differences out. Not that La Trienal is a dry and affirming lecture on diversity. The artists themselves may wonder what to call home. With just thirty-three contributors, it leaves ample room to share in their dilemma. With a dozen works commissioned for the occasion, it hopes to nurture them as well.

Digging up the past

Amalia Mesa-Bains lived and worked through the heyday of the "Pictures generation" and critical theory, and her show's title plays on The Archaeology of Knowledge, by Michel Foucault. He sees knowledge itself as a means of dominance, but does she? Well, yes and no. El Museo del Barrio sticks to work from the last thirty years, much of it from the 1990s, including the four "chapters" of Venus Envy brought at last together. It is by no means satisfied with penis envy, but by no means triumphant. This is the territory of Queen of the Waters, Mother of the Land of the Dead.

The chapters start with First Holy Communion, Moments Before the End, and surely, some might say, the Catholic church is as repressive an institution as any. A life-size doll lies beneath its blanket as if dead. Maybe so, but display cases contain flower petals, family snapshots, lace dresses, and white curtains along with saints. The installation also has a dressing-room table, for more of a girl's or a woman's world. Later a "great green monster," the proverbial earth mother reduced to wallowing in earth, has a hand-held mirror, too. For Mesa-Bains, as for Renée Stout and Myrlande Constant in Haiti, parodies and protests are never easy to distinguish from models and memories.

The next chapter comes to a proper library, a fine-wood table laden with the Bible, a skull, a compass, and a globe. It belongs to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a seventeenth-century scholar, proto-feminist, and nun. It is just one of the chapter's "enclosures," including a harem along with A Virgin's Garden, adapted from illuminated manuscripts. Apparently the artist can claim the Enlightenment and the Renaissance as her own, too. The final chapter, The Road to Paris and Its Aftermath, has a large photo of the Arc de Triomphe draped in electric colors. Mesa-Bains can claim the city of the Mona Lisa, Gertrude Stein, and Modernism as well.

Just a year ago, her sphere seemed more modest. She was at the center of "Domesticanx" and domesticity, including younger artists. Even now, she conceives of her installations as altares, or home altars, and ofrendas, or domestic offerings to the dead. Yet her claims here cover a lot of ground, and so do her memories. The solo exhibition could serve as a model for other museums, returning to one show to add context and depth. It need not leave the past behind.

Mesa-Bains still treats personal and collective memories as one thing. As a guard said when I asked where to begin, anywhere, because it is all "a thing." The remaining chapter centers on codices, or ancient manuscripts, and botanical texts from the past, both overlaid with snapshots and paints. It does so, she says, because she loves them, but they have a personal meaning as well. She worked on them while recovering from a near-fatal accident. Her faith in herbal healing is sentimental as can be, like so much of her art, but the pipettes and vials are evocative all the same.

As another title has it, these are Private Landscapes and Public Territories. One last work could never be hers alone. It turns to the border with Mexico for What the River Gave Me. Growing up in California as the child of illegal immigrants, she could not have known it as an obstacle or seen it shine, but no matter. The water becomes half globes of blown glass, set on a bed of shattered glass between banks of vaguely humanoid brown earth. Let it shine.

Domesticity with an X

There is a name for what Joel Gaitan has made—from a time, place, and culture that he could never have known. They are "face jugs," like those of the Stone Bluff Manufactory in South Carolina in and around the American Civil War. Set out on a crowded shelf, like the stoneware at the Met, they are comic, frightening, and schematic, and alive. For an oppressed people, like the black artists and laborers of Stone Bluff, they are also "us." Only Gaitan's honor his Nicaraguan heritage, his claims as a native-born American, and Mesoamerican art. They are also women, like Amalia Mesa-Bains and the rest of "Domesticanx"—or, not in the show, Natalie Ball.

Gaitan enhances his ceramics with gold highlights, as a woman's jewels or presence. You may not be sure how to take them, but then everything for Mesa-Bains is contested ground, much like Gaitan's immigrant community in Miami. She sees her own art as an expression of Latinx intersectionality, and she could hardly mind if the majority of Latin Americans do not care much for either term. She shares their concerns all the same, and her domesticity is only a step away from tradition. It just happens to be a giant step, in the direction of Chicana and feminist theory, and she coined it in the 1990s in direct response to a male Chicano writer's notion of "rasquachismo"—a blend of machismo and rasquache, or ragtag. It appears in the show's title in full caps, as veritable shouting.

Like domesticity itself, it is a modest ideal all the same. Her photocollage pairs Eve, the requisite leaves covering her private parts, beside a sleeping nun. Yet neither will save herself or the other, and the grainy photos challenge their place in Western religion and religious art. It is not so far from a family photograph on a nightstand in someone's home. Sure enough, the rest of show boils down to domestic settings, with photos like that very much in evidence. Gaitan himself displays one, looking every bit out of the past, and so does a show of all but familiar household interiors, in paintings and assemblage.

The curator, Susanna V. Temkin, sticks to just six artists in addition to Mesa-Bains (who also appeared at MoMA PS1 in "NeoHooDoo"), half of them emerging. They seem more modest and intimate still in that all seven have much the same subject and motifs. One might never know which is from Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, or Queens. Misla, single named, sets the tone with the largest and least cluttered paintings. She might be poring through memories of childhood and home, down to the neatly made bed, the knickknacks on an ornate chest of drawers, and the photograph on a wall. Maybe you can bring memories of your own.

People themselves rarely appear, apart from the photos and Gaitan's face jugs. Maybe it takes a man, the sole male artist, to make a big thing out of women. Portraits by Cielo Félix-Hernández do depict women at more than half length, with colors out of Paul Gauguin. Still, they belong to their setting, in a house and garden. Satin fringes enhance the domesticity, as do paper fringes for Nitza Tufiño (who appeared before at El Museo del Barrio as part of Taller Boricua, the Puerto Rican workshop). She mounts her photos on paper hung like clothing, on hangers or out to dry.

Modest or not (all the more so compared to Elso's talk of God), they are also altars to the downtrodden and the everyday. Gaitan constructs an altar for his family photograph, while Amarise Carrerasaltar assembles others for her color photos, including blood red and everything under the sun. Maria Brito constructs an entire house, with an absurdly tall crib, lips in wood on a black cabinet, hands on the side, and white ladders ascending from one to another. It would have room for Tufiño's painted coffee cans. Mesa-Bains has her cabinet, too, alongside video mounted in the stomach of animals. Conflict may consume Latin American women and human lives, but they are not just shouting.

Crossing borders

Visitors to La Trienal cross more than one border just by entering. A black beaded curtain, by Cosmo Whyte, leads to rooms often reserved for a second show, but among the museum's best for installations and big work. Whyte calls it Persona Non Grata, for not all are equally welcome in America. It leaves one face to face with a mural by Caroline Kent that takes her lively abstract shapes into a mix of painted and solid forms. It is, she explains, interdimensional. Borders, it appears, are for time travelers, too.

You may not even know that they are there. Nearby, Estaban Cabeza de Baca adopts the same mural scale for a tropical landscape. You might have settled in for vacation only to find yourself on the border between the United States and Mexico. Still other place markers are invisible, like bird calls from Mark Menjivar and scents from Chaveli Sifra. Paint for Ser Serpas (also in the 2024 Whitney Biennial) spills out from the walls and onto the floor, for an immersive experience. Trump's wall is mostly a fiction anyway.

Artists have crossed borders personally as well, starting with their heritage. Kent has a Mexican mother and an African American father. Regardless, they surely sympathize with those who have made the crossing just to survive. Studio Lenca suspends migrant caps from pieces of a Ford F-150 truck. Liz Cohen photographs women workers, while Studio Lenca calls its paintings Journeys. Tony Cruz Pabón marks the distance from San Juan to New York with pencil marks that bring him closer to Minimalism than folk art.

They may cross borders with their materials as well. Carmen Argo constructs her beings from plastic ties and palm leaves, while Sarita Westrup applies native crafts to a good old New York traffic cone. Raw materials like tar take Karyn Olivier from carnival in Trinidad to shelter in North Philadelphia. Then too, borders are place markers. Joe Zaldivar maps where every artist has landed, in New York and behind. As curators, Rodrigo Moura, Susanna V. Temkin, and María Elena Ortiz fill the entire museum, as if mapping a continent.

These are unsettling journeys, whatever the artist's cultural identity. This is not one big happy family. Alina Perez in charcoal remembers her family as anything but what she calls a Family Romance. Photos by Christina Fernandez remember long suburban nights in LA as a war zone. Mario Martinez uses light brushwork out of Abstract Expressionism to evoke every New Yorker's favorite toxic Superfund site, the Gowanus Canal. Kathia St. Hilaire can pack almost anything into low relief, from banknotes and banana stickers to a painted candle piercing the darkness.

Artists here may shy away from from conflict or boosterism, but anger remains. "They stole our land and now they call us migrants," a fisherman says in video by Alberta Whittle—and yet beauty remains in his labor and his nets. This translates into large work, and artists can easily coast on it. Smaller pieces and older media mostly fall short. Can a triennial, then, truly make a difference? Maybe so, but please do not ask for yet another.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Amalia Mesa-Bains ran at El Museo del Barrio through August 11, 2024, "Domesticanx" through March 26, 2023, and La Trienal 2024 through February 9, 2025.