The performative spirit of Amalia Mesa-Bains’ New World Wunderkammer

Abstract

Amalia Mesa-Bains’ New World Wunderkammer (2013–2014) reactivates the Early Modern cabinet of curiosities, a display form that European collectors once used to express their knowledge and possession of the known world. Her art installation restages the Caribbean collision of Native American, African, and European peoples that began in 1492, connecting it to the colonial histories of objects from the Fowler Museum at UCLA’s permanent collections. In her creative, feminist, decolonial interventions, Mesa-Bains secures agency for the oppressed by invoking Lucumí—a spiritual practice born in the Caribbean—and by performatively implicating her audience in related processes of coming together and healing.

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