Ana Mendieta


Ana Mendieta was a Cuban-American performance artist, sculptor, painter and video artist who is best known for her "earth-body" artwork. Born in Havana, Mendieta left for the United States in 1961.

Early life and exile

Mendieta was born on November 18, 1948, in Havana, Cuba, to a family prominent in the country's politics and society. Her father, Ignacio Alberto Mendieta de Lizáur, was an attorney and her mother, Raquel Oti de Rojas, was a chemist and researcher. Ana, aged 12, and her 15-year-old sister Raquelin were sent to the United States by their parents to live in Dubuque, Iowa through Operation Peter Pan, a collaborative program run by the US government and the Catholic Charities. Mendieta and her sister Raquelin were among 14,000 children who immigrated to America on their own in 1961. Mendieta's first two years in the United States consisted of constantly alternation from foster homes and orphanages. The sisters were able to stay together during this time due to a power of attorney signed by their parents mandating that they not be separated. Mendieta and her sister spent their first weeks in refugee camps before moving between several institutions and foster homes throughout Iowa. In 1966, Mendieta was reunited with her mother and younger brother; her father joined them in 1979, having spent 18 years in a political prison in Cuba for his involvement in the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Education

In Cuba, Mendieta grew up as a sheltered, middle-class child. Mendieta attended an all-girls Catholic private school. When she and her sister were sent to Iowa, they were enrolled in a reform school because the court wanted to avoid sending them to a state institution. When Mendieta studied English in school, her vocabulary was very limited. In junior high school, she discovered a love for art. Mendieta was first a French major and art minor, but when she transferred to the University of Iowa, she was inspired by the avant-garde community and the hills of Iowa's landscape. She earned a BA and MA in painting and an MFA in Intermedia under the instruction of acclaimed artist Hans Breder. In college, Mendieta's work focused on blood and violence toward women. Her interest in spiritualism, religion, and primitive rituals developed during this time. She said that she faced a great deal of discrimination in art school. After graduate school, she moved to New York City.

Work

Through the course of her career, Mendieta created work in Cuba, Mexico, Italy, and the United States. Her work was somewhat autobiographical, drawing from her history of being displaced from her natal Cuba, and focused on themes including feminism, violence, life, death, identity, place and belonging. Her works are generally associated with the four basic elements of nature. Mendieta often focused on a spiritual and physical connection with the Earth. Mendieta felt that by uniting her body with the earth she could become whole again: "Through my earth/body sculptures, I become one with the earth... I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body. This obsessive act of reasserting my ties with the earth is really the reactivation of primeval beliefs... an omnipresent female force, the after image of being encompassing within the womb, is a manifestation of my thirst for being." During her lifetime, Mendieta produced over 200 works of art using earth as a sculptural medium. Her techniques were mainly influenced by Afro-Cuban traditions.

Membership in Artists In Residence Inc

In 1978, Ana Mendieta joined the Artists In Residence Inc in New York, which was the first gallery for women to be established in the United States. The venture allowed the opportunity for Mendieta to network with other women artists at the forefront of the era's feminist movement. During that time, Mendieta was also actively involved in the administration and maintenance of the A.I.R. In an unpublished statement, Mendieta noted that "It is crucial for me to be a part of all my art works. As a result of my participation, my vision becomes a reality and part of my experiences." At the same time, after two years of her involvement at A.I.R. she concluded that "American Feminism as it stands is basically a white middle class movement", and sought to challenge the limits of this perspective through her art. She met her future husband Carl Andre at the gallery when he served on a panel titled "How has women's art practices affected male artist social attitudes?" Her resignation in 1982 is attributed, in part, to a dispute instigated by Andre over a collaborative art piece the couple had submitted. In a 2001 journal article, Kat Griefen, director of A.I.R from 2006 to 2011, wrote,
The letter of resignation did not cite any reasons for her departure, but a number of fellow A.I.R. artists remember the related events. For a recent benefit Mendieta and Carl Andre had donated a collaborative piece. As was the policy, all works needed to be delivered by the artist. Edelson recalls that Andre took offense, instigating a disagreement, which, in part, led to Mendieta's resignation. Even without this incident, according to another member, Pat Lasch, Mendieta's association with the now legendary Andre surely played some role in her decision.
In 1983, Mendieta was awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. While in residence in Rome, Mendieta began creating art "objects", including drawings and sculptures. She continued to use natural elements in her work.

''Silueta Series'' (1973–1980)

The Silueta Series involved Mendieta creating female silhouettes in nature—in mud, sand, and grass—with natural materials ranging from leaves and twigs to blood, and making body prints or painting her outline or silhouette onto a wall.
In a 1981 artist statement, Mendieta said:
I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body. I believe this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb. My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source.
When she began her Silueta Series in the 1970s, Mendieta was one of many artists experimenting with the emerging genres of land art, body art, and performance art. The films and photographs of Siluetas are in connection with the figures surrounding her body. Mendieta was possibly the first to combine these genres in what she called "earth-body" sculptures. She often used her naked body to explore and connect with the Earth, as seen in her piece Imagen de Yagul, from the series Silueta Works in Mexico 1973–1977. Mendieta's first use of blood to make art dates from 1972, when she performed Untitled , for which she stood naked in front of a white wall holding a freshly decapitated chicken by its feet as its blood spattered her naked body. Appalled by the brutal rape and murder of nursing student Sarah Ann Ottens at the University of Iowa, Mendieta smeared herself with blood and had herself tied to a table in 1973, inviting an audience in to bear witness in Untitled . Professor and art historian Kaira Cabañas writes about Untitled :
Her body was the subject and object of the work. She used it to emphasize the societal conditions by which the female body is colonized as the object of male desire and ravaged under masculine aggression. Mendieta's corporeal presence demanded the recognition of a female subject. The previously invisible, unnamed victim of rape gained an identity. The audience was forced to reflect on its responsibility; its empathy was elicited and translated to the space of awareness in which sexual violence could be addressed.

In a slide series, People Looking at Blood Moffitt, she pours blood and rags on a sidewalk and photographs a seemingly endless stream of people walking by without stopping, until the man next door comes out to clean it up.
Mendieta also created the female silhouette using nature as both her canvas and her medium. She used her body to create silhouettes in the grass; she created silhouettes in sand and dirt; she created silhouettes of fire and filmed them burning. Untitled , named for the Santería goddess of waters, once pointed southward from the shore at Key Biscayne, Florida. Ñañigo Burial, with a title taken from the popular name for an Afro-Cuban religious brotherhood, is a floor installation of black candles dripping wax in the outline of the artist's body. Through these works, which cross the boundaries of performance, film, and photography, Mendieta explored her relationship with a place as well as a larger relationship with mother Earth or the "Great Goddess" figure.
Mary Jane Jacob suggests in her exhibition catalog Ana Mendieta: The "Silueta" Series that much of Mendieta's work was influenced by her interest in the religion Santería, as well as a connection to Cuba. Jacob attributes Mendieta's "ritualistic use of blood," and the use of gunpowder, earth, and rock to Santería's ritualistic traditions.
Jacob also points out the significance of the mother figure, referring to the Mayan deity Ix Chel, the mother of the gods. Many have interpreted Mendieta's recurring use of this mother figure, and her own female silhouette, as feminist art. However, because Mendieta's work explores many ideas including life, death, identity, and place all at once, it cannot be categorized as part of one idea or movement. Claire Raymond argues that the Silueta Series, as a photographic archive, should be read for its photographicity rather than merely as documentation of earthworks.
In Corazon de Roca con Sangre Mendieta kneels next to an impression of her body that has been cut into the soft muddy riverbank.

Photo etchings of the ''Rupestrian Sculptures'' (1981)

As documented in the book Ana Mendieta: A Book of Works, edited by Bonnie Clearwater, before her death, Mendieta was working on a series of photo-etchings of cave sculptures she had created at Escaleras de Jaruco, Jaruco State Park in Havana, Cuba. Her sculptures were entitled Rupestrian Sculptures —the title refers to living among rocks—and the book of photographic etchings that Mendieta was created to preserve these sculptures is a testament to the intertextuality of Mendieta's work. Clearwater explains how the photographs of Mendieta's sculptures were often as important as the piece they were documenting because the nature of Mendieta's work was so impermanent. Mendieta spent as much time and thought on the creation of the photographs as she did on the sculptures themselves.
Mendieta returned to Havana, the place of her birth, for this project, but she was still exploring her sense of displacement and loss, according to Clearwater. The Rupestrian Sculptures that Mendieta created were also influenced by the Taíno people, "native inhabitants of the pre-Hispanic Antilles," which Mendieta became fascinated by and studied.
Mendieta had completed five photo-etchings of the Rupestrian Sculptures before she died in 1985. The book Ana Mendieta: A Book of Works, published in 1993, contains both photographs of the sculptures as well as Mendieta's notes on the project.

''Body Tracks'' (1982)

Body Tracks debuted on April 8, 1982, in Franklin Furnace in New York City. The tracks are long, blurry marks made by Mendieta on a large piece of white paper attached to a wall. While recordings of the sacred music of Afro-Cuban Santeria are heard, Mendieta dipped her hands and forearms into a mixture of tempura paint and animal blood, pressed her hands and arms firmly to its surface and slid down towards the floor.
The performance was documented in the 1987 film Ana Mendieta: Fuego de Tierra, and described by scholar Alexandra Gonzenbach:
In the short piece, the artist enters the studio space, while Cuban music plays in the background. She dips her hands and forearms into animal blood, places her back to the camera, lifts her arms and places them on a large sheet of white paper attached to a wall, and then proceeds to slowly drag her arms down the page, until almost reaching the bottom. She then walks off screen and out of the performance space. The camera, documentation, and performance stops.
The resultant pieces of paper were preserved by the artist after the event, and appear now as works of art in their own right in the collection of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. A still photo from the exhibit was the cover art of the Third Woman Press edition of the feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

Film works (1971–1980)

Though well known for her photographs, Mendieta's experimentations with film rose to critical acclaim on the occasion of the 2016 exhibition "Ana Mendieta: Experimental and Interactive Films" at Galerie Lelong, New York.
The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC, and family members found several films after her death while looking for work to be included in a retrospective at the New Museum in 1987. In 2016, more films were uncovered and digitized in anticipation of a documentary directed by the artist's niece, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta. As of 2019, that film, Rebel By Nature, is in post-production.
Mendieta presented a solo exhibition of her photographs at A.I.R. Gallery in New York in 1979. She also curated and wrote the introductory catalog essay for an exhibition at A.I.R. in 1981 entitled Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States, which featured the work of artists such as Judy Baca, Senga Nengudi, Howardena Pindell, and Zarina. The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York hosted Mendieta's first survey exhibition in 1987. Since her death, Mendieta has been recognized with international solo museum retrospectives such as "Ana Mendieta", Art Institute of Chicago ; and "Ana Mendieta in Context: Public and Private Work", De La Cruz Collection, Miami. In 2004 the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., organized "Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance", a major retrospective that travelled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Des Moines Art Center, Iowa, and Miami Art Museum, Florida.
Mendieta's work features in many major public collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva; and Tate Collection, London.

Death and controversy

Ana Mendieta died on September 8, 1985, in New York City, after falling from her 34th-floor apartment in Greenwich Village at 300 Mercer Street, where she lived with her husband of eight months, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, who may have pushed her out of the window. She fell 33 stories onto the roof of a deli. Just prior to her death, neighbors heard the couple arguing violently. There were no eyewitnesses to the events that led up to Mendieta's death. A recording of Andre's 911 call showed him saying: "My wife is an artist, and I'm an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, eh, exposed to the public than she was. And she went to the bedroom, and I went after her, and she went out the window." In 1988, Andre was tried and acquitted of her murder. During three years of legal proceedings, Andre's lawyer described Mendieta's death as a possible accident or suicide. The judge found Andre not guilty on grounds of reasonable doubt.
The acquittal caused an uproar among feminists in the art world, and remains controversial to this day. In 2010, a symposium called Where Is Ana Mendieta? was held at New York University to commemorate the 25th anniversary of her death. In May 2014, the feminist protest group No Wave Performance Task Force staged a protest in front of the Dia Art Foundation's retrospective on Carl Andre. The group deposited piles of animal blood and guts in front of the establishment, with protesters donning transparent tracksuits with "I Wish Ana Mendieta Was Still Alive" written on them. In March 2015, the No Wave Performance Task Force and a group of feminist poets from New York City traveled to Beacon, New York, to protest the Andre retrospective at, where they cried loudly in the main gallery, made "siluetas" in the snow on museum grounds, and stained the snow with paprika, sprinkles, and fake blood. In April 2017, protesters at an Andre retrospective handed out cards at the Geffen Contemporary with the statement: "Carl Andre is at MOCA Geffen. ¿Dónde está Ana Mendieta?". This was followed by an open letter to MOCA Director Philippe Vergne protesting the exhibit from the group the Association of Hysteric Curators.

Legacy

In 2009, Mendieta was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Cintas Foundation. Ana Mendieta's estate is currently managed by the Galerie Lelong in New York City. The estate is also represented by Alison Jacques Gallery, London. In 2018, The New York Times published a belated obituary for her that began, "Mendieta's art, sometimes violent, often unapologetically feminist and usually raw, left an indelible mark before her life was cut short." In 2010 she was the subject of Richard Move's controversial Where is Ana Mendieta? 25 Years Later - An Exhibition and Symposium, which included his film, BloodWork - The Ana Mendieta Story.