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

Collision

The Early Modern cabinet of curiosities was a precursor to the museum and was created by European ruling elites starting in the 16th century. Numerous objects in such a princely or aristocratic collection were displayed in a mosaic pattern, occupying nearly all of a room’s surface area. Some precious items were stored in drawers or behind cupboard doors in that same space, and there was often a study area nearby for the collector to examine various items. Wunderkammer (cabinet of wonders) and kunstkammer (cabinet of curiosities) are terms that refer to such a collection and display milieu which attempted to be encyclopedic, a microcosm of the entire known world. If a collection lacked an object to serve as an example or synecdoche of something known, then an entry in a supplemental compendium was accepted as the written surrogate that made it possible to complete the microcosm.

When Europeans encountered the Western hemisphere at the end of the 15th century and travelers brought objects back to Europe from what they believed was a new world, collectors incorporated the things into their cabinets, stretching their overall understandings of the universe while often misappropriating the objects’ meanings. In some ways, it was understandable that Europeans did not know how to make sense of it all. However, the predominant European belief that the peoples indigenous to the Western hemisphere and Africa were heathens led to their misrepresentation, particularly in the form of exoticization. The “collision” that Mesa-Bains invokes began when Columbus arrived at what we now call the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola, where he met the peaceful Arawak indigenous peoples, imprisoned some of them, and immediately thought of them as potential slaves. ⁸ The so-called discovery led to Inter Caetera—the notorious Papal Bull of 1493—Pope Alexander VI’s edict that gave European Christians sovereignty over the Americas, rendering the land colonizable and the peoples sub-human. As the story goes, many European colonies transformed into nation states throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, when modern museums were also invented. Exoticization and misrepresentation persisted in European and Euroamerican displays of non-Westerners long after the objects in private cabinets were made public in museums. Such intercultural dynamics intensified with 19th-century ethnographic exhibitions that included living people who performed as “Aztecs,” “Zulus,” and “Hottentots.” ⁹ While the live performances ceased to be so widespread in the 20th century, Europeans and Euroamericans would continue to frame colonized peoples’ material culture as ethnographic artifacts and “primitive art” throughout the 20th century. ¹⁰

In the late 20th century, however, the roles of non-Western objects in Western epistemologies became heavily deconstructed. The exhibition Art/artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections (1984) is emblematic in this regard: for it, curator Susan Vogel and her team placed objects in displays where they normally would not belong, such as priceless sculptures in ethnographic-style showcases, or an ordinary hunting net in an art gallery. According to Vogel, some visitors did not question the authority of the production and even offered to purchase the net for very high prices (Karp and Lavine, 1991: 196). Art/artifact thus worked to denaturalize curation as a practice that is not neutral but one that significantly shapes the meanings and values of objects. Vogel examines the details of Art/artifact in her contribution to Exhibiting Cultures (Karp and Lavine, 1991: 191–204), a volume that features several other essays by leading museum theorists such as James Clifford and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett on how objects are disciplined in exhibitions. What’s more, artists such as Fred Wilson, Renée Green, and Mesa-Bains employed curatorial strategies to criticize museums during the same period. ¹¹ By denaturalizing museum methods frequently mistaken as neutral, scholars, artists, and curators of the late 20th century—only some of whom are mentioned in this article—contributed to a significant deconstructive period in exhibition history. ¹² Informed by such scholarship, The Museum for African Art and the Fowler Museum became leading places for curatorial interventions since the late 1980s. Mesa-Bains (2013b) interrogates modern categories and display conventions in conversation with the artists, scholars, and curators I note, citing the older cabinet form to invoke the roots of intercultural display and appropriating it to become “an autonymic or self-descriptive device, reclaiming heritage, legacy, and geography while ultimately gesturing toward the healing of a stolen and distorted past” (p. 36). Her ambitious installation for the Fowler is part of this ongoing pursuit of reclamation.

New World Wunderkammer occupies a gallery shaped like a right trapezoid, formed by terra-cotta walls with entrances at the two angles that are farthest from one another (see Figure 1). ¹³ Flush against the center of the longest wall is a commanding mocha-colored cabinet, and at the right of it is a dark wooden box that holds a cluster of spears. Across the room from this weapons display is a shorter wall that runs parallel to the longest one, and joins another at a wide angle where Mesa-Bains placed a globe and two chairs, located directly across from the cabinet fixture. On each side of the chairs hang four framed digital prints at eye level. Three tables at the center of the room echo the trapezoidal shape of the perimeter, completing the structure of this unusual spatial environment. Indeed, the wunderkammer is quite excessive, which explains why one is likely to encounter new things and have a different experience during each visit. The large wooden cabinet is a focal point of the wonder room. This elaborate piece of furniture was custom-built to protect and organize objects from the Fowler collections, putting them into conceptual relations with one another. As shown in Figure 2, it consists of three main sections entitled “Africa” (at the viewer’s right), “The Americas” (center), and “Colonial” (left). We might interpret these sections as manifestations of the divisions constructed by European colonizers to make sense of various lands and their peoples, categories that became experienced as real through ideological choreographies that could never be perfectly fulfilled. Each of the three sections features about 25 Fowler objects that were produced in contexts that would fit into such categories, but whose significance is not limited by them. Some have never been publicly viewed in a museum before. Among them are what Mesa-Bains calls guardian figures that are centrally placed in order to protect the others as the public becomes exposed to the contexts of their production, the processes of their collection, and their current conditions. For example, the Americas section is organized around a pair of guardians from Nayarit, Mexico sculpted circa 100 BCE–250 CE (see Figure 3). The artist explained to me that all of the objects in the Americas section of the cabinet were taken from burial grounds. The Nayarit guardians were extracted from the Ixtlan del Rio archaeological site where they accompanied the remains of someone belonging to the Huichol or Cora peoples indigenous to this region on the western coast of Central Mexico. While even archaeologists have much to learn about the Nayarit figures, the two that Mesa-Bains chose as her guardians stand firmly with the woman’s hand signaling to the viewer to come forward, and the man beside her defensively holding a spade axe. Perhaps they communicated to tomb visitors a message to enter cautiously. In the Fowler wunderkammer, constructed 2000 years later, such gestures are emblematic of what Mesa-Bains asks from them: to provide us with a guarded invitation.

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Figure 1.

Installation view of Amalia Mesa-Bains’ New World Wunderkammer (2013–2014). Photography: Joshua White/JWPictures.com. © Photo courtesy of the Fowler Museum at UCLA.

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Figure 2.

Detail of Colonial, Americas, and Africa cabinet in Amalia Mesa-Bains’ New World Wunderkammer (2013–2014). Photography: Joshua White/JWPictures.com. © Photo courtesy of the Fowler Museum at UCLA.

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Figure 3.

Detail of the Americas section in Amalia Mesa-Bains’ New World Wunderkammer (2013–2014). Photography: Joshua White/JWPictures.com. © Photo courtesy of the Fowler Museum at UCLA.

The Nayarit figures are related to similar ones located in the box to the lower right of them, such as a pregnant woman also from Nayarit and two others from Colima—two cities which, along with Jalisco, make up western Mexico’s coastal cultural network that created the ancient shaft tombs where most of the ceramic items were found. The objects extracted from these burial sites are on the International Council of Museums’ Red List for items that are at risk of being irreparably damaged, because over 90% of them were looted under dubious circumstances and are not currently under acceptable care. Many museums have acquired them as gifts from independent collectors and now serve as their caretakers. In New World Wunderkammer, however, Mesa-Bains (2013a) explains that the central figures “are meant to function as the matriarch and patriarch within the space of the cabinet. By giving them voice as guardians and witnesses to history, I seek to shift the balance of power from the collector to the collected” (p. 6). I understand this as a critical intervention that takes to heart Appadurai’s (1988) assertion that “commodities, like persons, have social lives” (p. 3). Rather than reducing the figures’ significance to their contexts of production, Mesa-Bains acknowledges how they have been reassigned value as objects of historical and cultural heritage in the museum. She does not suggest that such movement de-authenticates them by undermining their original purposes, or that it violates what Appadurai (1988) would call “the spirit of the gift,” an idea that has been traditionally opposed to capitalistic conceptions of the commodity because it does not involve money (pp. 11–16). Instead, Mesa-Bains approaches the “lives” and “spirit” of the objects as parts of the medium for her art. She provides a conceptual framework that acknowledges their pasts in a 21st-century context where they have active roles in how their values and meanings are produced. In the Fowler, they are guardian figures who have traveled across regions, eras, cultures, institutions, and categories to tell their stories as contemporary, living things. Indeed, their biographies are critical to the presentation of mestizaje that Mesa-Bains relays throughout the installation.

The two guardians of the Americas group appear directly across from themselves in a digital image affixed to the wall entitled Nuestros Antepasados (Our Ancestors). It is one of eight framed giclée prints Mesa-Bains created that feature the guardians as well as other key Fowler objects digitally overlayed onto scenes that represent places they once inhabited. In Nuestros Antepasados, Mesa-Bains chose ancient codices to suggest travel toward Nayarit, and a photograph of a shaft tomb in the area now known as the Ixtlan del Rio archaeological site—the burial ground from which the objects were taken. All eight giclée prints face the shelving unit and the Fowler objects that appear in them, invoking from across the room their production and collection histories, thus incorporating their varied life stories as contextual layers in the wunderkammer, stories that may not have been evident in the display of the objects alone. This creates a spatial dialog, a citational crossfire that visitors necessarily enter into when they occupy the space. Thus, everyone who passes through her installation becomes implicated in the ongoing, open-ended construction of value and meaning—the continuing social lives—of these figures.

Directly to the left of Nuestros Antepasados hangs Journey to Mictlan, a digital print that focuses on a dog-effigy bowl most likely created by the Colima people (see Figure 4). The print also includes codices that suggest a pathway to somewhere, perhaps to the scene in the background photo of similar objects in a collector’s tripartite display that is strikingly similar to the one custom-built for the Fowler. Such a citation suggests to me that the artist is aware of how her own installation, despite its decolonial goals, contributes to the social lives of the objects in ways that are formally similar to the displays of past collectors. However, significant differences can be traced through Mesa-Bains’ attempts to construct in her installation what Appadurai (1988) calls a diversion, a critical term inspired by a New Guinean circulation of valuables that involves the reshaping “of culturally conventionalized paths for the flow of things” (p. 21). Here, the figures are not relegated to some original purpose, nor are they only relics of the past; they are contemporary figures who have traveled a long way to confront a curious public. The pathway codices in the print also connect the dog-effigy bowl and viewer to Mictlan, as the title suggests, which is the name of the Aztec underworld. The title and itinerate symbolics of the print reveal how the dog is a guide to the spirit world, a leader among all of the objects in the Americas section that were produced by indigenous peoples from across the western hemisphere and were connected, in one way or another, to the dead’s transition to the afterlife. Such items include a flying ceremonial rattle in the shape of a raven that Mesa-Bains added as an homage to Bill Reid, a Haida carver and her former mentor. Reid did not create the specific object in New World Wunderkammer, but Mesa-Bains expands its referentiality to include him because he was invested in raven imagery and carved some of the most prized wooden sculptures still on view at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology (or, simply, “MOA”). He is now part of the spirit world.

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Figure 4.

Journey to Mictlan by Amalia Mesa-Bains (2013). Giclée print included in New World Wunderkammer. Image courtesy of the artist.

Mesa-Bains explained to me that the objects in the Americas section are mostly related to death whereas those in the Africa section are more about struggle in life. One might infer that such a distinction is related to the histories of indigenous and African-descended people in the Americas: Europeans killed massive numbers of Natives in war and genocide in order to make room for their colonies, whereas those people brought here from Africa were valuable alive as sub-human slaves. All three of the sections include a number of figures that speak to each other within and across the divisions embodied by the shelving unit, which demonstrates how the artist recognizes that intermingling is operative at all levels. She clarifies that the Africa section

[C]ontains objects suggestive of violence and reflecting the brutality of the slave trade, but it contains as well African objects of great beauty connected with healing of possessing spiritual and social influence. The guardian in this cabinet is an nkisi, a power figure made and used by Kongo peoples of Central Africa. Such figures have the authority to settle disputes and the power to heal the sick. (Mesa-Bains, 2013a: 7)

To make her references to the slave trade explicit, she boldly included on the left shelves of the Africa section neck, wrist, arm, and leg manacles made in West Africa and used in the slave trade (all from the Fowler collection) (see Figure 5). Perhaps this was a reference to Fred Wilson’s Metalwork 1793–1880 (1992), for which he placed slave manacles next to fine silver under a new category he created, showing how the latter were made possible by the former and undermining their segregation via traditional classification. Mesa-Bains, by contrast, placed technologies of bondage under the familiar category of “Africa”; however, because the items bear the traces of relations to Europe and the Americas, which are themselves presented just inches away, these “metalworks” reach beyond Africa in the installation, thus undermining the category’s purity and power of imposition. Just above the manacles in New World Wunderkammer is a white beaded cap, a Yorùbá interpretation of a barrister’s wig that was worn in British courts during Nigeria’s colonial period. The beaded wig was created for a spiritual leader and included because Mesa-Bains wanted a counterpoint to the objects related to slavery and colonialism, one that showed African agency and critical interpretation. The very serious looking nkisi figure in the center is the guardian for this section. He was created in Kongo and traveled through Portugal, Spain, and France before arriving in Los Angeles, and somewhere along the way had additional nails hammered into his body by collectors or dealers who wanted to make him appear more full. Such additions have seriously compromised his structure (formalism ravaged on the non-Western yet another time). For Mesa-Bains, he is emblematic of the processes involved in mestizaje because of his triangular, transcontinental journey that crossed all the main routes of the Atlantic slave trade. To me, he is a survivor, and his experiences through multiple continents over many decades do seem to prepare him to be an effective guardian in an installation for which intercultural healing is a primary goal.

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Figure 5.

Detail of the Africa section in Amalia Mesa-Bains’ New World Wunderkammer (2013–2014). Photography: Joshua White/JWPictures.com. © Photo courtesy of the Fowler Museum at UCLA.

To the right of the nkisi is a Sowei mask made of wood, plant fiber, and sea snails by the Mende people of Sierra Leone. Fowler records clarify that, “This mask, with its gleaming black surface, ringed neck, and complex superstructure ornamented by two rats and four fish, alludes to water, the source of secret knowledge and deep wisdom that Sande bestows upon its young initiates.” The museum holds over 40 of these masks and Mesa-Bains studied them all, knowing that she wanted to include one to represent women’s contributions to the Africa section. As with the nkisi figure, she refers to the Sande mask with agential language; when looking at all of the masks together, she was drawn to this particular one and explained, “she just knew she was the one. We could see that little smile on her face so we picked her immediately.” ¹⁴ I interpret such language as evidence that the artist has internalized the notion that these objects have social lives. The mask also appears across the room in a giclée print that contextualizes her above a black and white ethnographic photo and painting of Sierra Leone. Below and to the right of the mask in the physical space of the cabinet are three items from the Yorùbá people of Nigeria, including a pair of ère ìbejì figures that could have been viewed in the concurrent Fowler at Fifty exhibition entitled Double Fortune, Double Trouble: Art for Twins Among the Yoruba. It featured hundreds of other twin sculptures from the Fowler collections, and explained to audiences that the Yorùbá, “have one of the highest rates of twinning in the world, and special attention is paid to twins, both in life and after.” ¹⁵ Yorùbá people experience a 5% twin birthrate, compared to 1% in Western Europe, and understand twins as anomalies associated with their belief that every person has a spiritual double, and that in the case of twins, the double has come to earth rather than remained in the spirit world. Both are thus treated as sacred (White, 2010: 10).

Mesa-Bains’ inclusion of the twins, the nkisi, and the Sowei mask perform conjoining work, in multiple ways. They link New World Wunderkammer to the rest of the Fowler collections, because the museum has many of such items in storage as well as in other galleries. The twins are connected to the Yorùbá people and a phenomenon that for them is a form of mingling between the living and the spirits, which then links the Africa section of the cabinet to the Americas section that also features objects related to how people interact with spirits, albeit in relation to death rather than unusual birth. Furthermore, one-third of the items in the Africa section were made by the Yorùbá people, their predominance also a gesture toward the spiritual aspects of the cabinet that emanate from below, which I will discuss in the next section of this article, entitled “Rasanblaj,”. Many of the items in the Colonial part of the wunderkammer, at far left, are also spiritual, including two crosses made in Oaxaca, three retables (Latin American devotional paintings) made in Mexico, two Saint figures made in Guatemala, and several others. The guardian figure in this section is a sculpture of Saint John the Baptist brought to the Americas from the Philippines, a reminder of the galleon trade that transported Asian goods to Latin America in exchange for precious metals. The sculpture thus invokes transcontinental connections that exceed a reductive view of colonialism as only a relationship between Europeans and indigenous peoples. Furthermore, Mesa-Bains indicates that she added Saint John the Baptist and other saint figures to “represent the zealous drive of Catholicism to erase indigenous belief systems.” She describes the Colonial section as an inconsistent combination of metals, ceramics, and wood. She believes that, in comparison with the objects in the Americas and Africa sections, those in the Colonial section have a weaker, diluted quality to them (“like third generation Xerox copies”). ¹⁶ At first blush, the artist’s comment might seem to suggest that she understands the objects in terms of authenticity, that those created in Africa and the Americas are more pure than the others. This might be true, but given her keen attention to the variable lives of other objects, I interpret her observation as a formal one that hints at their contemporary roles in the installation. Many of the Christian objects in the cabinet made by Europeans were intended to subordinate non-Europeans and convert them to Catholicism. They therefore functioned as more disciplinary than the objects in the Americas and Africa sections. Perhaps Mesa-Bains included the distressed European items in New World Wunderkammer to suggest the diminishing power of colonial discipline in her decolonial framework. Nonetheless, the European side, including the Spanish conquistadors who spearheaded the colonization of Latin America, contribute to Mesa-Bains’ own family history. The Colonial section is impure with objects also made by non-Europeans, such as a crown and fan from the Afro-Bahian people of Brazil, because they are responses to colonial relations driven by the Europeans. They are all part of Mesa-Bains’ complex arrangement that recalls the violent coming together of Europe, Africa, and the Americas in a triptych that bears witness to the collision which exploded out from the Caribbean just over 500 years ago.

Rasanblaj

If colonialism fueled the collision that Mesa-Bains references, how might we reclaim this heritage to forge more livable futures? The artist approaches possible answers by attending to spirituality in the Americas as a different kind of mixing: one that heals. Below the three main sections of the shelving unit are Blessing Spaces anchored by a few objects from the Fowler collections that are absorbed by the artists’ own spiritual practice. At each of their base is white, red, or black sand that suggests a racial coding of the peoples represented by the sections above. However, as with the objects that inhabit the upper regions, those included in the spaces below disrupt any neat divisions. The dog-effigy bowl featured in Journey to Mictlan inhabits the Blessing Space with red sand that is directly below the Americas section. At his right (the viewer’s left) is a seated feminine effigy, and at his left is a seated masculine effigy, both extracted from the shaft tombs of Jalisco. Mesa-Bains asks them to protect the dead here, like they did before they were looted and then confined to museum storage spaces. Carmen Lomas Garza assisted Mesa-Bains with the organization of this Blessing Space, insisting that it must incorporate young and old, life and death, multiple genders, multiple colors, and natural elements that correspond to each of the four directions (north, south, east, and west). Indeed, this Blessing Space performs as a Sacred Hoop, a prayer to the spirits and a gesture of healing to those of us who still inhabit the material world, which includes the objects in the gallery, visitors to the museum, museum staff, and the artist. Mesa-Bains confirms that the Blessing Spaces are, “intended for the spiritual protection of the objects, myself, and the viewers—allow[ing] me to begin a respectful healing process that is necessary for reclaiming the cultural history of my own ancestry.” ¹⁷

Although the wunderkammer showcases objects that were not made by Mesa-Bains, and conjure up stories of cultural collision, violence, and resistances that are important to the makers of such objects, the artist identifies herself as one of the products of this mixing, this mestizaje. The cabinet, like the majority of her installation art, therefore has strong biographical components. Three tables located approximately four feet away from the impressive triptych support objects that are mostly the artist’s, particularly flora and fauna as well as botanical journals that explore plants indigenous to the Americas (see Figure 6). ¹⁸ These study vitrines are reminiscent of the Early Modern cabinets and studioli where European collectors would examine things in designated study spaces; but in the Fowler, visitors are encouraged to participate in a collective investigation directed by Mesa-Bains, complete with examination tools such as a microscope, beakers, and a magnifying glass. While museums generally discourage touch in displays, she welcomes it (so long as her glass skulls do not break). The study tables thus bring together an assortment of diverse objects and people, involving them in a common process, a living form rather than a frozen one. As such, New World Wunderkammer contributes to contemporary innovations in participatory and relational art theorized by Nicolas Bourriaud (1998), Claire Bishop (2004), Shannon Jackson (2011), Martha Buskirk (2012), and others, where process and interactivity are valued as parts of the artistic medium. Of course, these elements have always been important to installation art which has been Mesa-Bains’ primary genre since the 1970s, but museums and art centers are now commodifying and re-signifying such dynamics to greater degrees than before. Buskirk (2012) writes that relational art and dialogue are now too often little more than excuses to throw a party, as she reminds us that the art world must always be understood as an industry (pp. 327–328). Asserting that there is no outside of the system, she explains that, “The question therefore remains of how to navigate this terrain, still looking for moments of insight, even inspiration, despite the many distortions associated with artistic marketing and promotion” (Buskirk, 2012: 327). As one among many people who have engaged with Mesa-Bains’ installation, the interpretations I offer in this article attempt to do just that as partial forms of participation.

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Figure 6.

Detail of study table in Amalia Mesa-Bains’ New World Wunderkammer (2013–2014). Photography: Joshua White/JWPictures.com. © Photo courtesy of the Fowler Museum at UCLA.

Overall, I understand New World Wunderkammer to be an assembly, compilation, enlisting, and regrouping of ideas, things, people, and spirits. ¹⁹ It is a non-exhaustive spatial encyclopedia, an attempt to relay in a single project a broad history of the Americas which includes the personal history of the artist—but with a more humble realization that the assembly is temporary, that no one can fully own the items placed in it, and that it is impossible to capture an entire universe in just a few hundred square feet. While that is all true, the themes and the objects in New World Wunderkammer are arguably important to everything and everyone, a relational dynamic that enables her to fulfill the task of cabinet completion, yet avoid the delusion of exhaustive possession characteristic of the Early Modern collections. Mesa-Bains also understands the meanings of the objects she compiled with far more nuance than did the European collectors of centuries past. Conceptually, she begins with collision, with the coming together of objects and peoples from the four Atlantic continents, in a violent clash driven by European supremacy and greed. But this is not the only way that such things mix in the installation. Mesa-Bains invites collaboration with and between those who engage the wonder cabinet and sought spiritual guidance to construct the Blessing Spaces.

One spiritual practice that resonates throughout the wunderkammer emerged from where the worlds first came together: the Caribbean. Cuba, to be precise, the second island that Columbus became slightly less ignorant of during his first voyage across the Atlantic. Here, Lucumí (Santería) is a thriving religion that was born out of Yorùbá beliefs brought to the island by enslaved Africans who masked their deities—gods known as orishas—behind images of Catholic saints as they also embraced elements of Arawak culture and spirituality. ²⁰ Camouflage was necessary due to how the Spanish colonizers forced indigenous and enslaved peoples to convert to Christianity or suffer extreme consequences if they did not (native peoples were also referred to in writing as pagans or Saracens—Muslims—which documented the limits of European thought during colonialism). Lucumí manifested in Cuba similarly, but not equivalently, to the religions of other islands such as Vodou in Haiti, Shangó in Trinidad and Tobago, and Kumina in Jamaica, as well as Candomblé in Brazil. ²¹ Guided in collaboration by her friend and mentor Marta Moreno Vega, founder of the Caribbean Cultural Center and a practicing Lucumí priestess, Mesa-Bains devoted the African Blessing Space to Lucumí, and let its power emanate throughout the rest of the installation—not unlike how the religion continues to expand from its ground zero, the Caribbean, the first point of collision, to the rest of the Americas and beyond with its millions of practitioners worldwide.

At the center of the African Blessing Space is a wooden Yorùbá divination bowl with an intricately carved lid, a pair Mesa-Bains selected from the Fowler collections. This item was used to store ritual materials such as palm nuts for Ifá divination ceremonies. Such a placement of the bowl acknowledges the centrality of Lucumí’s Yorùbá roots, as it links the Blessing Space with the West African objects placed on the shelves above and activates the pair’s social lives by inviting them to participate in the installation’s spiritual becomings. In front of the bowl, the artist placed seven small glass cups of water that invoke Yemayá, the revered maternal orisha who resides in the ocean, and who has seven caminos or pathways that represent her different roles in Lucumí. Yemayá is also commonly represented by blue and white, the colors of the two candles located at the far left of the blessing space. The orisha is therefore central to the African Blessing Space and pulses through the other two which feature small containers of water. Mesa-Bains did not reveal these details to me in our interviews, but repeatedly stressed the importance of water to the installation and let me figure out why on my own. Yemayá offers us knowledge if we explore the unknown, and I suspect that the artist provided clues without revealing her full identity so my relationship to the wunderkammer, and to Yemayá, would be necessarily implicated in Lucumí cosmology rather than coldly distanced from it in the name of “objectivity.” The artist’s pedagogical prompt was successful; I can no longer approach the cabinet without recognizing the orisha’s powerful presence there as a participant in her own right.

Yemayá, deity of the ocean, has strong connections to the Middle Passage, that horrifying liminal event experienced by Africans who were held captive on ships en route, without their knowledge, to the Americas where they and generations of their descendants would be enslaved. M. Jacqui Alexander (2006), whose watershed book, Pedagogies of Crossing, is dedicated to Yemayá, insists that many individuals would not have survived such an involuntary crossing of the Atlantic without their spiritual beliefs, and that it would be a grave oversight to ignore these aspects of their lives in order to participate in a trendy disavowal of the sacred (pp. 15–16). She includes a first-person account of the Passage from the lower regions of a ship—described as a dungeon—during which Kitsimba, soon to be renamed Thisbe on a plantation, called out to Yemayá as other captive people were thrown overboard into the depths of the great water (Alexander, 2006: 288–289). Alexander (2006) continues by recalling in her own words how those who survived the crossing, “graced all things with the wisdom of Ashé … Being everywhere was the only way, they reasoned, to evade capture and to ensure the permanence of change—one of the Truths of the Ocean” (p. 289). Yemayá is thus part of what enables this “being everywhere.” In a stunning description of how the orisha continued to bear witness to the horrors of slavery and colonialism, and to provide some compensation in the midst of both, Alexander (2006) recalls,

For months after the massacre [of three hundred Native Americans in a single day], Indian blood usurped the place of mud and ran into the narrow channel that led to the Caribbean Sea, but not before depositing layers of bloody silt thick with suffering at the bottom of the river’s floor. The bloody river took the story to the Sea, the Wide Sargasso Sea, which absorbed the grief, folding it into its turquoise jade until it assumed the color of angered sorrow. It spun into a vortex, a current in the Caribbean. (p. 290)

She continues by showing how the grief proceeded, with the help of other orishas, spreading to all of the continents and impacting the entire world. Indeed, the histories that Alexander recalls resonate throughout all of Mesa-Bains’ wunderkammer that encompasses the “new world.” If the artist included objects in the African section that are related to the slave trade, then Yemayá’s presence in the installation helps absorb the grief of those who have been connected to them and have died. By promoting such a process of grieving with Yemayá, Mesa-Bains’ desire for the objects to continue to live and confront new challenges in the Fowler Museum seem to me to be respectful and genuinely inclusive. As a spiritual collaborator, the orisha bears witness to the deceased who created the Native American objects that were themselves created for the dead. She also flows through the watery bodies of visitors who enter the space to engage with these stories and the structures of colonialism, slavery, and racism that are far from resolved.

The majority of items in the African Blessing Spaces come from Mesa-Bains’ home altar. Over many years, she collected images of black deities within Catholicism, some of which she included in the Blessing Space, together with an homage to her life partner Richard Bains, various powders, and bags from a botánica that provoke transformation during the Ifá divination ceremonies which would have incorporated the Yorùbá bowl, as well as small Native American figures to index the common understanding in Lucumí of how Native Americans, along with various Africans and Europeans, are all part of an individual’s set of spirit angels (Vega, 2000: 17). What’s more, Yemayá is not the only deity that the artist invites into the Lucas Family Gallery. A pair of white candles stand together at the rear left of the space, a tribute to Obatalá, the orisha who exemplifies that there is power in patience and understanding, traits that the artist told me she especially admires. Obatalá is friends with Shangó, a warrior orisha connected to passion and power, whose colors are red and white like the candles located at the right of the Blessing Space. Mesa-Bains associates Shangó with her dear friend, Juan Boza, a queer painter who died unexpectedly while she was curating his work at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. ²² She described him to me as “so wonderful, it is frightening,” which is why she has taken him with her everywhere she goes, and honored his spirit as a participant in New World Wunderkammer. The small painting located on the wall between the triptych and the box of spears was created by Boza, placed above a set of three red candles which also evoke Shangó.

Mesa-Bains traces her own African ancestry through her grandmother, Marianna, whom she identifies as mulatta, despite the fact that her family did not racialize her in such a way and instead narrated her heritage as simply Mexican. The artist considers a photograph of her racially mixed grandmother with her brothers to be a foundational image that invokes the three major divisions of the cabinet: Spanish (Colonial), Indigenous (Americas), and African. It links all of the Blessing Spaces; a copy is buried in the sand of each one and is partially visible below the other items, reminding us of how the components of mestizaje are always in relation and never pure. The photo lies near Richard Bains’ portrait in the African Blessing Space, between the dog-effigy bowl and the seated effigy in the Americas Blessing Space, and below a number of trinkets and personal items in the Colonial Blessing Space. The Colonial Blessing Space conjures up more family memories, with images and objects connected to Mesa-Bains’ father who journeyed to the United States around 1917, during the Mexican Revolution, when workers like him were encouraged to move north. He lived closely with horses and other animals in Colorado, which partially explains why the artist decided that the single Fowler object in this space should be a carved San Martín Caballero—the horseman revered for his kindness to the poor—surrounded by horseshoes and other equestrian items. The Colonial Blessing Space, therefore, contributes to the wooden horseman’s enduring social life: here, he embodies a set of values from the Spanish colonizers that Mesa-Bains admires and associates with her family. On the right, she arranged objects that are beautiful in ways that are loosely related to Spanish and baroque aesthetics, mostly to honor the strong women of her family. The six copper milagros (miracles; healing charms) that are affixed to the wall of the Colonial Blessing Space were made by a jeweler in Monterey, California for her own personal botánica table, each associated with a part of her own body that has needed healing. ²³

In the left cluster of objects from her family, inside the Colonial Blessing Space, is a small orange ceramic vase with “Puerto Rico” inscribed on it. It is a token she purchased while visiting San Juan for a major, multi-institutional solo exhibition of art by Pepón Osorio. Mesa-Bains is especially connected to Osorio who, as noted above, himself reactivates the cabinet of curiosities in his installation art, albeit with an attention to the exchange of items through tourism, travel between the Caribbean and the Northeastern United States, as well as social issues that matter to Caribbean and diasporic peoples. Thus, in the spirit of his art, she placed this tourist item in the section reserved for her closest family members, perhaps to include Osorio as an honorary member. Mesa-Bains (2013b) recently authored “The Latino Cabinet of Curiosities,” an article that analyzed the ways in which their career trajectories have developed together both formally and politically, and in our interviews, she explained how they have also connected spiritually.

These complex personal and spiritual elements that mingle in the lower regions of the cabinet enact a mixing of peoples and things, of cultures and religions, which emerged in the aftermath of the great collision of 1492. Accomplishing their own kind of mestizaje, they performatively reclaim the violence, the sadness, the death—the colonialism—that were the conditions of their possibilities. In the Fowler Museum, they band together in a concerted effort to heal the wounds of loved ones and strangers who become familiar due to their shared experiences of loss, and of perseverance. They are the supportive foundation for a work of art that solicits participation not only from an art-going public, but also from the objects and the spirits recruited by the artist. They are the rasanblaj, to use the Haitian Kreyòl term, the critical regrouping and reactivation that gives us hope for how to heal and live with responsibility to our pasts, presents, and futures. As Mesa-Bains so gracefully shows us in New World Wunderkammer, and as Alexander so convincingly argues throughout Pedagogies of Crossing, our time-honored feminist mantra needs an addendum: the personal is political, and it is also spiritual.

A new world

Before the objects from the Fowler collections were removed from storage and placed into the Lucas Family Gallery, Mesa-Bains requested to schedule a limpia, a spiritual cleansing. Berns approved of this action which is unusual inside of museums, a decision that reveals the director’s strong sense of ethics and responsibility to the objects and peoples connected to the wunderkammer. UCLA instructor and Nahuatl philosopher, Martha Ramírez-Oropeza, led the limpia which required the Fire Marshal’s presence as the sprinkler system was shut off so copal (an Aztecan purifying agent) could be burned, because the smoke would otherwise set off alarms and prompt water to be sprayed in the galleries. The ceremony lasted 90 minutes. A blessing was offered to the four directions in Nahuatl, a Uto-Aztecan language that is currently spoken by approximately one and a half million people. Mesa-Bains was smudged, followed by the three main guardian figures, followed by the Fowler staff and others present. Indeed, all of the Fowler staff came to be smudged and blessed which Mesa-Bains described to me as “simply beautiful.” A conch shell called upon the Gods. Ramírez-Oropeza recited stories laced with important pedagogy: she spoke of the old and the young and the four directions, and explained the values with which they are associated (ancient for wisdom, youth for hope, and so on). Everyone lined up and was cleansed. The objects could then come together and prepare to meet the public.

The Sacred Hoop, the shape that heals, is not a line, not an arrow (arrows cut, like linear time does), but a circle that moves through four dimensions. Mesa-Bains returned to the Early Modern cabinets of curiosities in her installation. I will conclude our journey by returning to my first encounter with New World Wunderkammer. Not yet in the Lucas Family Gallery, but just outside of it, I was studying a timeline of Fowler exhibitions that were photographically indexed throughout the walls of the hallway. My attention was visually directed at installation photos when sounds began to echo toward me, as particles massaged my eardrums, vibrating, touching me. So I abandoned my quiet contemplation and walked toward them. They grew louder, until I joined them. There, inside the terra-cotta trapezoid were visitors opening drawers to reveal clusters of Milagros, Flints, and Lightning Rods (there are many other components to the marvelously excessive wunderkammer that I have not analyzed in this article, about which I hope others will write). A woman leaned toward the San Martín figure in the Colonial Blessing Space, pointing to the wood-carved figurines, trying to provoke excitement in a little girl—“see the horses?” A college student gasped with pleasure when she recognized that the Yorùbá twins in the cabinet were related to those in another exhibition just across the museum’s courtyard. The thud of slow footsteps. Quiet observations of the giclée prints, as if they were in a white cube, even though they clearly were not. Soft and uncertain clinks from someone touching the glass items on the central table. Another gasp, louder this time, from someone who discovered the partially buried family photograph in front of the dog-effigy bowl. Together in curiosity. Together bearing witness. Performing our own forms of healing, perhaps. The Hoop. Yemayá. A circle that moves through four dimensions. Disturbed water. A vortex. A giant ripple. A series of concentric ripples. Building momentum. Growing stronger. Enveloping the surface of our wondrous and blue orbiting sphere.

First, collision. Now, rasanblaj.

For Gassia, whose knowledge and balance honor us all.