Ana Mendieta

Cuban-born artist

• Born: November 18, 1948
• Birthplace: Havana, Cuba
• Died: September 8, 1985
• Place of death: New York, New York

Mendieta’s brief career was marked by increasing recognition for her artwork, which combined feminist, ecological earthwork, and performance interests. She died under suspicious circumstances in 1985, and her husband’s arrest, trial, and acquittal for her murder divided the New York art world.

Early Life

Ana Maria Mendieta Oti (AHN-ah mah-REE-ah mayn-DYAY-tah OH-tee) was born in Havana, Cuba, the younger daughter of wealthy parents. Her father, Ignacio Mendieta, was an early supporter of Fidel Castro’s rise to power in 1958. Soon, however, he fell under suspicion and life for the family became dangerous. The girls, Ana and her sister Raquelin, were sent to safety in the United States in 1961, but their life there was difficult. They lived in Iowa in foster care until joined by their mother and brother in 1966. Mendieta’s father was imprisoned in Cuba until 1979, when he immigrated to the United States.

Mendieta attended the University of Iowa, majoring in indigenous arts and cultures. In 1969, she began graduate studies in studio art at the same university. Under the mentorship of one of her professors, Hans Breder, she began her performance and intermedia studies. With Breder, she made the first of several trips to Mexico. These trips were a significant source of inspiration for her. Mendieta received her master’s of fine arts degree in 1972.

Life’s Work

“Body” was a key concern to Mendieta as an artist. In the Silueta series, which she created from 1972 to 1981, she used her own body in a variety of performance pieces to investigate her relationships with nature, Hispanic culture, and homeland. Her body, or rather the silhouette of her absent body, combined with blood, grass, flowers, or fire, was the medium for exploring the divine rituals of burial and rebirth, her ties to the Earth. In 1980, Mendieta returned to Cuba for the first time; there, in 1981, she completed the Silueta series.

This series had precedents in work by other artists, including the earlier work of Yves Klein. However, unlike her male contemporaries, such as artist Robert Smithson, Mendieta’s work is nonmonumental and even self-effacing. While other earthwork artists tended to extreme formalism, Mendieta’s work was raw and immediate. Much of this work is now only known through her photographic documentation, which was organized and became available for research in the mid-1990’s.

From the late 1970’s until her death, Mendieta’s opportunities for exhibition, teaching, and visiting artist awards increased. She joined the feminist A.I.R. Gallery in New York in 1979 and had her first solo show there. She left that gallery, however, in 1981, saying that feminism created too simplistic a reading of her work. She began developing a network of patronage that allowed her to create works of greater permanence. Her visiting artist positions give evidence of her growing prestige. In 1983, she received the Rome Prize enabling her to live at the American Academy for a year, but she extended this residency into 1985. Her career was in ascendence.

Mendieta had met Carl Andre, a sculptor, at the A.I.R. Gallery. They traveled together in Europe during her residency and married on January 17, 1985. On September 8 of that year, Andre called New York police to report that Mendieta had fallen to her death from their apartment window.

Significance

At her death, Mendieta was still developing as an artist. No assessment can ever be given to works that were not created. In her surviving works and the documentation which exists for her ephemeral pieces, she enacted postmodernism before that critical discourse had been invented. She showed herself to be capable of negotiating between and among the divisions by which the art of her times was classified. She was a feminist, but not merely a feminist, and she crossed between dominant and subdominant cultures. Similarly, she transgressed the borders of abstract, performance, political, ecological, and mainstream modernism. Only after her death was it recognized that such transgression of categories was a hallmark of postmodernist work.

Bibliography

Adler, Esther. “Ana Mendieta.” In Modern Women: Women artists at the Museum of Modern Art, edited by Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010. Brief but critically informative essay providing an opportunity to understand Mendieta’s work in relation to other women artists in the museum’s collection.

Katz, Donald. Naked by the Window: The Fatal Marriage of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990. Detailed and journalistic biography of Mendieta that focuses on her suspicious death in 1985 and the subsequent trial and acquittal of her husband, Carl Andre, for murder.

Moure, Gloria. Ana Mendieta. Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 1996. Catalog containing several essays and many photographs that accompanied a 1996 exhibit of Mendieta’s work, the first exhibition benefitting from access to her archives, which were collected and organized after her death. Includes a bibliography.

Viso, Olga. Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture, and Performance, 1972-1985. Washington, D.C.: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, 2004. A catalog documenting one of Mendieta’s exhibitions, with essays placing her work within the criticism of late twentieth century art.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Unseen Mendieta: The Unpublished Works of Ana Mendieta. Munich, Germany: Prestel Verlag, 2008. A thematic presentation of Mendieta’s work. Includes many photographs and a bibliography.