Artists’ book – VENUS ENVY: Chapters I-IV

About the book
The book, Venus Envy: Chapters I-IV, documents the four-part Venus Envy Series of autobiographical installations completed over several decades by Amalia Mesa-Bains to chronicle four chapters in her life as a Chicana woman. It uses historic photographs in an accordion-fold structure to illustrate the series undertaken between 1993 and 2008. These images are accompanied by significant texts by art historian and critic Jennifer A. González.

The Venus Envy Series is a narrative through personal and collective feminist perspectives of the artist Amalia Mesa-Bains’s life stages, from early childhood to marriage to aging. The story unfolds through a number of altar-installations using an aesthetic of vernacular abundance and accumulation done in settings of religious splendor, secret spaces of the feminine, and archaic landscapes of paradise. It is situated in a historical continuum from the present to the colonial period of European expansion into the Orient to the time of the Aztec Empire, and it ends in a reflection on health challenges leading to healing and recovery. These contemporary practices of wonder and beauty are at the same time a woman’s political remembrance of conflict and joy, sorrow and loss and resilience.

Art critic and historian Jennifer A. González writes in her introduction,”Mesa-Bains’s tableaus are neither a simple enactment of religious tradition nor a purely secular art installation, but rather a hybrid genre intended for a new Chicano/art-identified audience able to decipher the multiple iconographic references in both a Mexican and US historical context. The slippage between “folk” art and “fine” art, between tradition and innovation, is characteristic of Mesa-Bains’s altar installations.”

This is the eighth book in the CHICANX/LATINX SERIES of artists’ books from Felicia Rice and Moving Parts Press. These works of contemporary Chicanx/Latinx artists and writers in translation explores the intersection of cultures, disciplines, and book structures. Each book is the result of a close collaboration with the book artist, Felicia Rice.

About Amalia Mesa-Bains
Amalia Mesa-Bains is an artist and cultural critic. Her artworks, primarily interpretations of traditional Chicano altars, resonate both in contemporary formal terms and in their ties to her Chicano community and history. She has innovated on sacred spaces and created contemporary installations exhibited nationally and internationally. She has written about Chicano and Latino art and is a leader in the field of community arts. Among her many awards is the distinguished MacArthur Fellowship. She is Professor Emerita in the Visual and Public Art Department at California State University at Monterey Bay. Learn more at her website: amaliamesabains.com

About Jennifer A. Gónzalez
Jennifer A. González is a professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz, and a faculty member in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York. She has published in numerous journals including Diacritics, Camera Obscura, Bomb, Open Space, Art Journal, the Journal of the Archives of American Art and in numerous exhibition catalogs. Her books include Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (2008) which features the essay, “Divine Allegories,” on Amalia Mesa-Bains’ installation work. She served as chief editor of Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (2019) which was included in the best art books of the decade by ArtNews in 2020.

Read more here.