An Introduction to My Research On Ana Mendieta
Ana Mendieta’s work encompasses a vast number of topics and artistic genres, making her difficult to pin down in a specific movement, but incredibly interesting to discuss in the variety of contexts that she worked within and between. Even though she died tragically young and was only largely producing artwork for about a decade and a half, she put a great amount of emotionally charged and socially critical pieces onto the spaces that she accessed.
Mendieta was born in 1948 in Havana, Cuba, the middle child between an older sister and younger brother. Her father worked for the Cuban government, but ended up working in opposition to the Castro regime and because he became targeted for political infidelity, he sent his family to the states to protect them when she was 12. Ana and her sister were bumped around the foster care system for a while and she was separated from her family, which is where a lot of her feelings of impermanence and temporary spaces stemmed from, emphasizing her feelings of exile and abandonment from her home country.
She attended the University of Iowa where she earned her Bachelor of Arts, a Master of Arts in painting and a Master of Fine Arts in intermedia. It was in 1973 that the violent rape and murder of Sara Ann Otten occurred on campus, where shamefully little was done surrounding the case. She developed performances titled Rape Scene, where she would invite people to view her newest performance art in her living space. They would find her half-naked and covered in blood, tied to a table, in her apartment which was made into a disaster.
It was also in the mid-1970s that she began her Silueta series, perhaps the sequence of works that she is best known for today. She experimented with creating a general female shape in different natural settings and materials—this could be in mud, dirt, flowers, sand, water, with fire, branches, and sometimes involved covering herself in mud, grass, or other raw media. She would make the figures, document them, and allow them to deteriorate back into the earth over time.
Mendieta moved to New York City just before 1980 and became involved with Carl Andre, an artist taking part in the Minimalist movement. They had a relationship that perplexed their friends, as they were near polar-opposite beings in a number of respects. They split up before reuniting and eloping in Rome early in 1985, returning to New York later in the year. On September 8th, the couple spent the evening indoors to enjoy some Chinese takeout, champagne, and a movie. The next morning, Ana Mendieta’s body was discovered on a roof 33 flights below her apartment window, and Andre left with little recollection of the event because of the alcohol. After being charged with her murder, he was acquitted of all charges after three years of the trial going on.
Much as Mendieta herself rejected being categorized by any of the movements happening during the time she spent active in the art world, a lot of her ideals and creations echoed the values of a number of different artistic factions that flourished at the same time she did. Especially her Siluetas could be considered Earth Art, being so strongly tied to the natural world, and a lot of her themes involve feminist thought and criticism of society and patriarchal structures. Especially retrospectively, she has been associated with Land Art, Feminist Art, and Performance Art, engaging with these through different lenses such as the religious aspects of her native Cuban Santeria and native groups such as Mayan and Tainan peoples. She managed to successfully fuse a number of different approaches to make a new rationale for her art-making, something that emerging artists even today—myself included—have identified with and delve from in creating new art.
