Amalia Mesa-Bains, Transcendental Painting Group

Episode No. 592 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Amalia Mesa-Bains and curator Michael Duncan.

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is presenting "Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory," the first retrospective of the pioneering Chicana artist. The exhibition includes nearly 60 works including fourteen of Mesa-Bains' major installations. It was curated by María Esther Fernández and Laura E. Pérez and is on view through July 23. The outstanding catalogue was published by the Berkeley Art Museum in association with University of California Press. Amazon and Indiebound offer it for about $50.

Across a half-century, Mesa-Bains has foregrounded Chicana forms such as altares (home altars), ofrendas (offerings to the dead), descansos (roadside resting places), and capillas (home yard shrines) into contemporary art. Her work often spotlights domestic spaces and the construction of landscape in ways that highlight colonial erasure. Among the museums which have presented solo exhibitions of Mesa-Bains' work are the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Williams College Museum of Art, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

As promised on the program:

• Sandy Rodriguez on Episode No. 532.

On the second segment, curator Michael Duncan discusses "Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, 1938-45," which is at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through June 19.  The exhibition presents a group of mostly northern New Mexico-based artists, including Raymond Jonson and Agnes Pelton, who built a spiritually-informed abstraction with a painterly language that included symbols and images drawn from the collective unconscious. The show's catalogue was published by the Crocker Art Museum and DelMonico Books. Amazon and Indiebound offer it for about $60.