Written by: Anais Caro
Artwork by: Guinevere Pandolfi
Ana Mendieta was born in 1948 in Havana, Cuba. After her birth, her father soon joined anti-Castro counter revolutionary forces and at the age of 12, Mendieta and her sister, Raquelin, were sent to the United States under the U.S covert Cold War program Operation Pedro Pan. This program aimed to “protect” school-aged Cuban children whose parents were possible targets of Fidel Castro's regime and from the rise of Communist ideologies implemented by the regime. About 14,000 children in total were brought to the U.S under these auspices and were placed into asylum camps and foster care. Thus, Ana Mendieta and her sister themselves grew up without the rest of their family in the U.S foster care system.
In 1966 she began attending the University of Iowa and received a bachelor’s degree in art and master’s degree in painting. However, Mendieta quickly grew dissatisfied with painting as a medium and enrolled in the university’s then-new MFA Intermedia Program. The program introduced her to a more creative and progressive multimedia approach to art that would later gain her much acclaim in her career. Here Mendieta began delving into the world of performance art and photo documentation, which directly countered the simplicity and two-dimensionality of painting. Performance art provided Mendieta the opportunity to interact with the world in a much more dynamic way. Her work was guided by her identification as a woman, a woman of color, and a child of the Cuban diaspora, and she began to showcase her relationship to these themes in photography and film.
Mendieta is most known for her “earth-body” pieces in which she used her body, the earth, and other organic materials such as blood and wood as the main media for her work. We see this is her Silueta Series (1973–80) in which she laid down in natural landscapes, covered her body in these organic materials, and then documented the resulting impression and silhouettes her body had left on the scene through film and photography. During the 1970s, land art became very popular among contemporary artists. However, Mendieta's interpretation of land art was much more intimate than merely adding or cutting something out from nature; she was in conversation with place. She once said,
“I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette). I believe this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source.”
As a child of a diaspora, there is a constant feeling of being bound between two or more spaces at once yet never tethered to one or the other; held in a limbo of constant self-reflection and doubt. Thus in her siluetas, Mendieta left her visible and physical mark on the land through her body. As a product of the Puerto Rican diaspora myself, an interaction and conversation with place, on my own terms, is the only logical and seemingly possible way to grapple with this territorial bind between two spaces: one in which I long for and one in which holds me now.
Unfortunately, in 1985, at the age of 36, Mendieta suffered a tragic death after falling out of the window of her 34th-story apartment in New York City. It is believed that her husband of 8 months, fellow artist Carl Andre, pushed her out, but his charges were soon dropped. Her mysterious and tragic death garnered a lot of attention, and Mendieta has sometimes become more synonymous with her death than with her own work. Her sister Raquelin always protests this act and explains that her death has nothing to do with her actual work. Her sister argues that Mendieta’s work was “about life and power and energy and not about death”.
Despite having her career cut short, Mendieta’s work transcended the physical confines of the art world and pushed into unique spaces. She exhibited her work internationally and was even invited to exhibit in Cuba by the Cuban government. In her brief career, Mendieta received many awards including the Italian Rome Prize, and she joined the first all-female gallery in the United States, Artists in Residence (A.I.R.). Yet, despite this acclaim, Mendieta still struggled to reach full mainstream recognition in the art industry.
The lack of celebrated female artists, such as Mendieta, does not negate their existence. Today,
Mendieta’s work is essential to include in the narrative of decolonizing the art world and its negation of women, especially women of color, from its ranks. In order to make this change, there must be a purposeful and conscious effort to not only center those who have been excluded from the narrative but to also attempt to understand their, as in artists of color, own personal narratives. BIPOC artists' identities and work are not confined to their experiences with their race or gender in its entirety. Yet, it is these simplifications of identity that exclude them from being represented. Thus, it is imperative to highlight the artist's own work and voices, regardless of how it may or may not fit in the box of “diversification”, because it is a direct reflection of them as a person and artist, and not merely as their marginalized existence. However, Mendieta's career was built upon exploring the need for intersectionality and representation. In a curatorial statement for an exhibition of women of color, she once reflected, “As non-white women, we struggle two-fold…This exhibition points not necessarily to the injustice or incapacity of a society that has not been willing to include us, but more towards a personal will to continue being ‘other’”. Mendieta’s work was not made for any particular gaze but rather to extend her own personal will to not only exist but to take up space as a non-white women. It is her very pursuit to exist in her art that makes her work and legacy so powerful. As a Latine person myself, I instantly connected with Mendieta's will to exist as the “other” and the visible and tangible imprint she leaves as she exerted this will. It is white supremacy and colonialism that continuously allows for stories, experiences, and work like hers to be lessened and swept under the rug. However, it is her self-awareness, passion, and determination to leave a mark, both physically and metaphorically, that allows her art to live on and remain so powerful.
Image 1: Mendieta, Ana. Untitled. 1972. ARTstor, University of California, San Diego, https://library.artstor.org/#/asset/ARTSTOR_103_41822003782479;prevRouteTS=1611256713344. Photograph.
Image 2: Mendieta, Ana. Untitled: Silueta Series. Exhibited in New York, Winter 1988. ARTstor, Larry Qualls Archives, https://library.artstor.org/#/asset/LARRY_QUALLS_10311711991;prevRouteTS=1611256427106. Photograph.
Image 3: Mendieta, Ana. Untitled: Silueta Series in Mexico. 1973-78, Exhibited at Galerie Lelong, Spring 1992. ARTstor, Larry Qualls Archive. https://library.artstor.org/#/asset/LARRY_QUALLS_10311716072;prevRouteTS=1611256236560. Photograph.
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