Categories: Cornelia Feye, THE BUZZ

THE BUZZ: Assemblages of Memory: The Art of Ana María Herrera

by Cornelia Feye

January 21, 2025

Ana Maria Hererra with Misteria Dolorosa, 1995

Ana Maria Herrera is a striking woman. In a crème silk blouse and black wrap skirt she meets me at Café Provecho! in Bread & Salt, orange coffee cup in hand, her long, wavy dark hair piled to one side. I asked her to tell me about the layers of memories in the title of her exhibition at the Athenaeum Art Center at Bread & Salt.

The layers of memories go back to Herrera’s youth in Tijuana, where she was born and attended catholic school run by nuns. A black painting with white handwriting that looks like notes on a black boards entitled Scars of Material. It refers to a memory from her time with the nuns. One nun disliked her greatly and made her recite long passages by heart in front of the whole class. When she faltered, the nun told her she was no good and Herrera felt humiliated. The treatment scarred her for life.

Tiempos de Abstractos Pensares/Times of Abstract Thoughts by Ana Maria Herrera

Another memento from catholic life is an oversized Rosary draped over a pedestal, with small portraits on each 5 inch “pearl”. To this day, Herrera says, every night at 8:30 she prays the rosary with a group of women on zoom to set positive intentions.

When Herrera was six years old, she began taking black & white photos with her first camera. She later received a degree in photography from Southwestern College and she uses her photos in her assemblages.

Immediately to right when entering the Art Center, hangs Tiempos de Abstractos Pensares/Times of Abstract Thoughts from 1995, an assemblage including photographs and found objects. A large window frame is filled with a collection of pressure gauges interspersed with photographs of bald heads and small images of eyes inserted in various places.

“There is so much pressure in life,” Herrera says, “in the window frame, I wanted to show profound moments in life that take your breath away and let us see beauty with new eyes.”

The old machine parts Herrera finds and builds her assemblages around were thrown away as trash, but they become her treasure in the new context of art.

Ruta di Diablo, Devil’s Highway – Ana Maria Herrera

            A related assemblage in a window frame is entitled Ruta di Diablo, Devil’s Highway. Here we see pressure in action, creating a tortured open mouth in a silent scream. There is so much pain in this distorted face, the mouth wide open, the palate pierced by a metal pin. Next to it a tired looking heart with darkened valves has a door handle, but if this poor heart can still be opened or if it is closed shut by pain remains a mystery. Paint is dripping like blood down to the lower level onto another pressure gauge. Ruta di Diablo depicts the migration route of illegal immigrants, with all their suffering and devastation, Herrera explains.

She finds the rusted old machine parts in unexpected places and collects them to use in her work.  Her daughter gave her as a Christmas gift three boxes full of rusted machine parts, and her husband, a surgeon in Chula Vista where the family now lives, pleads with her not to pick up any more trash. But Herrera likes the scars on the objects, scars of time, telling stories of times past about what remains hidden and what we choose to reveal. In Algia/Pain half of the piece is hidden behind a curtain.

Algia/Pain, 1996 by Ana Maria Hererra

Several pieces provide a QR code through which sound is audible—in one instance sounds of a couple fighting. “Words can sometimes throw you away”, Herrera says. Words can ruin a life, because they cannot be taken back. On the other side “we find our human connection through moments that hurt us.”

Herrera is not just an artist, she studied medical billing to support her husband, and took a break from art to raise her two children. She was an art teacher in their school, which explains the gap in the years of her pieces, between the 1990s and the mid 2020s. Now her daughters are grown and she has more time for herself and her art. Her process is to lock herself into her studio and go deep inside herself. She creates a void to hear the sound of the wind, the sound of silence the sound of birds. She looks deeply at the found objects until they tell her their story.

Telemundo en Chiapas, from 1998 by Ana Maria Herrera

During our interview a group of three Mexican women visited the exhibition and engaged in a lively conversation about the art. I introduced Ana Maria Herrera as the artist and they immediately told her how they could relate to her work. On top of Telemundo en Chiapas, from 1998, a weathered cabinet including a doorknob, a framed photo of a woman behind traditional Mexican food, and a caged photograph of a young boy, a make-shift antenna out of wire is mounted. Laughingly the women told the artist that they used to have antennas just like it.

In fact, Herrera told me, this piece relates to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) often referred to as the Zapatistas. It is a far-left political and militant group that controls a substantial amount of territory in Chiapas, the southernmost Mexican state. 

Her political engagement extends to being a founding member of XoQUE, a feminist border art collective of diverse voices including Xicanas, Mexicanas and Native women committed to social and racial justice challenging the status quo and providing a visual counter narrative. 

As such Herrera would like “viewers to look closely to question what often goes unnoticed and find beauty in what was once forgotten.”

Ana Maria Herrera, Layered Memories
Athenaeum Art Center, Bread & Salt
1955 Julian Ave. San Diego, CA 92113
January 11- March 14, 2025

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