{"id":896,"date":"2026-07-12T10:37:16","date_gmt":"2026-07-12T10:37:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=896"},"modified":"2026-07-12T10:37:16","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T10:37:16","slug":"ana-mendieta-the-body-artist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=896","title":{"rendered":"Ana Mendieta, the Body Artist"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Before Ana Mendieta, the Cuban American artist, became a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, in 1983, she\u2019d never had a studio of her own. Five years earlier, as an ambitious twenty-nine-year-old, she\u2019d moved to New York City in the depths of winter, and soon rented a poky, dark apartment on the ground floor of a building in Greenwich Village. \u201cDesolate\u201d was how she described the place. She scavenged planks of wood for shelves and a table, and she carved out a workspace for herself beneath a loft bed, which had a mattress that she\u2019d dragged in from the street.<\/p>\n

Read more Day at the Beach<\/a><\/p>\n

The limitations of the space didn\u2019t matter so much, though, given the artistic path that Mendieta was forging. She had originally seen herself as a painter, but she\u2019d more or less relinquished the medium by 1972, the year she finished a graduate degree in the subject at the University of Iowa. \u201cMy paintings were not real enough for what I wanted the image to convey,\u201d she once explained. \u201cAnd by real I mean I wanted my images to have power, to be magic.\u201d Instead of creating conventional canvases or sculptures\u2014works that needed wall or floor space to be made and displayed\u2014Mendieta had developed an artistic practice that might combine performance, land art, and an instrumental use of her own body. In 1982, Mendieta had staged one such work, \u201cBody Tracks,\u201d at Franklin Furnace, a multidisciplinary venue in what was then the cast-iron wilderness of Tribeca. A small audience assembled in a room where three large blank sheets of paper had been affixed to a wall. On the floor was a basin filled with a viscous liquid, tempera paint mixed with animal blood that was likely procured from a slaughterhouse. Then Mendieta\u2014an energetic and diminutive woman, just five feet tall, if that\u2014walked in, to the accompaniment of a drumbeat, dressed in a baggy white ensemble. She drenched her hands and arms in the mixture, reached to the top of one piece of paper, then forcefully smeared her limbs down the surface to make two bloody tracks, ending up on her knees on the floor. Mendieta performed this action twice more before absenting herself, leaving the audience to contemplate the visceral imprints she left behind.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In Rome, however, Mendieta had space and light, and\u2014with a studio perched over the academy\u2019s lovely, pine-filled gardens atop the Janiculum Hill\u2014immediate access to the natural world. She could also enjoy new urban pleasures: she screeched around the city in a Volkswagen while yelling through her rolled-down window in demotic Italian; as a native Spanish speaker, the language came easily to her. Friends observed that Mendieta\u2014who had been born in Cuba but, at the age of twelve, was sent to live in exile in the United States\u2014had found in Rome a warm, sociable culture that was reassuringly familiar. Mendieta was vivacious, fast-talking, intense; she got into arguments and very loudly held her ground. In Italy, she could be like this without being stereotyped as a hotheaded Latina, as she often had been in America.<\/p>\n

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Her experience in Rome was so liberating that her artistic practice opened up, too. Mendieta enlisted a gardener at the academy to help her haul a fallen plane tree into her studio. She obtained other trees, then stripped their bark and burned abstracted silhouettes of human figures into the exposed grain, using gunpowder that she kept stashed in a cookie tin. Ida Panicelli, a curator who got to know Mendieta in Rome, and who would go on to serve as the editor of Artforum<\/em> in the late eighties and early nineties, recalled recently, \u201cShe could finally produce things. Her work was so ephemeral before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Four forms that Mendieta made from those tree trunks in Rome make up a freestanding work that\u2019s catalogued as \u201cLa Jungla (Totem Grove).\u201d The series will be on display, starting this summer, at the Tate Modern, in London, as part of a wide-ranging exhibition of the artist\u2019s work. The show, one of several recent and forthcoming exhibitions dedicated to Mendieta\u2019s \u0153uvre, will also include some of the works for which she is best known, from her years-long \u201cSilueta Series.\u201d In these pieces, made between 1973 and 1980, Mendieta used the measurements or the outline of her body to mark the ground, or placed herself in juxtaposition with trees, flowers, and other aspects of the natural world. These \u201cearth-body\u201d works, as she often called them, were documented in photographs or on film. Among them is perhaps Mendieta\u2019s most recognizable work, \u201cIm\u00e1gen de Y\u00e1gul,\u201d a color photograph that she made in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1973. In the image, she poses nude within the rocky interior of an ancient Mesoamerican tomb, with sprays of white blossoms rising from between her legs and sandwiched between her arms and her torso, her face hidden by the flowers. The vitality of her body is apparent even as she lies still in a space built for burial; her hands are poised on her hips, and her feet appear to be raised, hovering slightly above the dark shadow of the earth.<\/p>\n

Mendieta\u2019s name recognition, at least to the broad museumgoing public, is not comparable to that of, say, Frida Kahlo or Tracey Emin, both of whom have also been celebrated with Tate shows this year. But Mendieta\u2019s art has been increasingly embraced in recent years, especially by young women, who recognize her as a kind of contemporary, even if her work was made half a century ago. Katy Hessel, the author of \u201cThe Story of Art Without Men,\u201d a female-centered survey, calls Mendieta \u201cone of the most important artists of the twentieth century.\u201d The essayist and critic Olivia Laing, in her book \u201cEverybody,\u201d from 2021, places Mendieta in the context of the second-wave feminism of Andrea Dworkin, who wrote with incendiary fury about the violence of men toward women, and of Angela Carter, whose novels and short stories vividly reinterpreted myths and fairy tales with a feminine awareness of erotic danger. Mendieta\u2019s work, Laing writes, suggests \u201cthe certainty of destruction, and the certainty too of abiding, resisting.\u201d Laing also observed that Mendieta \u201cused violent material in ways that feel full of liberating possibility, but that doesn\u2019t mean she herself was out of harm\u2019s way.\u201d<\/p>\n

The certainty of destruction was an essential dimension of Mendieta\u2019s art. The outline of a body that Mendieta stamped into river mud would inevitably be eroded by weather and water; the feathers that she stuck to her skin could disperse as she ran naked along a beach. Like all art that incorporates elements of performance and temporality, Mendieta\u2019s is not always easy to access or appreciate, and the films she made documenting her work\u2014the digitization of which has been painstakingly overseen by her niece Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, who now heads the Ana Mendieta estate\u2014can\u2019t fully capture the moments of execution. There are few artists whose pieces more keenly make a viewer wish that aroma could be conveyed by digital reproduction: the vegetal scent of mud, the heady perfume of flowers, the iron reek of blood. Much of Mendieta\u2019s work has a striking visual effect at its core: in \u201cUntitled (Glass on Body Imprints),\u201d a series from the early seventies, photographs capture her through a sheet of glass onto which she has pressed her face and body, smearing her nose or cheek or mouth into a distorted fleshy mass\u2014a gesture that the British artist Jenny Saville would echo some twenty years later, in her collaborations with the photographer Glen Luchford. Other Mendieta works are more private, even secretive, including the \u201cRupestrian Sculptures,\u201d made in the early eighties, in which Mendieta carved figures into the walls of limestone grottoes in Cuba. Mendieta was active at a time when female artists, especially female artists of color, had so much less currency than their male counterparts that being overlooked, however much it was resented, offered its own kind of freedom. It\u2019s impossible to view Mendieta\u2019s output and not think about the physical stamina and cultural daring that she must have had\u2014not only to make art from her exposed body but also to hide herself away and make work that might only ever please or satisfy herself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The Tate Modern show will be arranged thematically, with each of the sections representing a facet of the natural world explored in Mendieta\u2019s work. The first section, called the Cave, is based on pieces made in those grottoes in Cuba, and features what might be called neo-Neolithic images\u2014figures resembling fertility goddesses. Other sections are named the Grove, the River, the Sacred Grounds. The museum also plans to re-stage some of Mendieta\u2019s ephemeral works. Staffers at the Tate Modern have been growing a crop of sphagnum moss in order to re-create a living sculpture of wire mesh and climbing plants. The piece, called \u201c\u00c1rbol de la Vida \/ Mother of All Things,\u201d will be assembled against a tree outside the building. (These works will be executed in part by Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, who will reconstruct them from images in cases when the artist left no written instructions.) The curators have also selected several paintings that Mendieta worked on as a student; museumgoers can assess the presence or absence of magic in them. Valentine Umansky, one of the show\u2019s curators, explained to me, \u201cIt\u2019s not really organized in a way that follows the axis of her life, because, in a way, all the themes loop.\u201d<\/p>\n

The thematic presentation helps underscore the idea that Mendieta\u2019s work prefigured the environmental concerns that have lately become widespread among artists. (As the critic Ben Davis recently noted, this year\u2019s Venice Biennale includes \u201cunbelievable amounts of work about plants, and water, and farming.\u201d) Umansky suggested that younger audiences may find in Mendieta\u2019s art an exploration of the malleability of identity. She was playing with the concept of gender as early as 1972. That year, in \u201cUntitled (Facial Hair Transplants),\u201d which was preserved in a series of photographs, Mendieta and a friend, the poet Morty Sklar, stood side by side in front of a mirror; as Sklar shaved his beard off, he handed clumps of hair to Mendieta, who applied them to her own face with glue, resulting in a realistic if unruly chin-strap. Umansky told me that by the final section of the show, called the Threshold, a visitor should have a sense of Mendieta as an artist of transformation: \u201ctransforming into a dog, transforming into a tree, transforming into a bird, transforming by changing genders, transforming her face\u2014with this idea of this energy or life force that allows this transformation, from death to rebirth, and also from one state to another, one element to another.\u201d Umansky went on, \u201cThe show really ends with this idea, which is also something that I think contemporary audiences can resonate to: We can reinvent ourselves. Nothing ends. We constantly transform. And all that we touch changes us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mendieta\u2019s first transformation was forced upon her, when she was on the cusp of adolescence. Although in New York City she lived the frugal existence of an impoverished artist\u2014she paid her rent, in part, by working as a waitress at Food, the artists\u2019 canteen in SoHo\u2014she was born, in 1948, into Cuba\u2019s social and economic \u00e9lite. One of her great-grandfathers, Carlos Mar\u00eda de Rojas, had been a hero of the 1895 War of Independence, and a great-uncle, Carlos Mendieta, had briefly served as President of Cuba, in the nineteen-thirties. Her father, Ignacio Mendieta, was a prominent lawyer, and her mother, Raquel, was a chemistry teacher. Ana and her sister, Raquelin, who was two years older, grew up with servants at the family\u2019s homes, in Havana and on seaside properties outside the city.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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This privileged childhood was ruptured in 1960, a year after the Cuban Revolution ended. Mendieta\u2019s father, who was part of a group that had helped the C.I.A. work against the rise of Fidel Castro, became concerned for his and his family\u2019s safety, and Raquelin and Ana were among some fourteen thousand Cuban children who were sent to the United States as part of a program known as Operation Peter Pan. (Ignacio\u2019s fears were justified: he was imprisoned by the Castro regime, and wasn\u2019t released until the late seventies.) The sisters spent several weeks in a refugee camp in Florida, and were then dispatched to an orphanage in Dubuque, Iowa. Locals became their foster parents, treating them with differing degrees of kindness. \u201cI don\u2019t care who you were in Cuba\u2014you\u2019re nobody in this country!\u201d one foster parent reportedly told them. It would be five years before the sisters were reunited with their mother and their younger brother, after they also relocated to the U.S.<\/p>\n

Despite receiving no encouragement from her high-school art teacher, who failed to identify any talent in her first sculptures, Mendieta enrolled at the University of Iowa to study art. After graduating, she enrolled in a master\u2019s program at Iowa and taught art at an elementary school. Her practice eventually grew more experimental under the influence of a professor named Hans Breder, who also became her romantic partner for several years. Breder had founded an interdisciplinary \u201cIntermedia\u201d program at the university; in a statement from 1971, he and two other artists encouraged others to see art \u201cas an indispensable force in the life of any human culture, away from the inanimate investment hanging on the wall or trickling out of the background stereo.\u201d Breder, who was thirteen years Mendieta\u2019s senior, was well connected in avant-garde circles, and he invited some of his forward-thinking friends to visit Iowa. One was Vito Acconci, whose work included \u201cFollowing Piece,\u201d in which he surreptitiously trailed pedestrians around New York City.<\/p>\n

Mendieta began staging her own site-specific projects, including several works that refer powerfully to sexual violence. In one work, made in response to the brutal assault and murder of another female student, she went into her apartment and stripped from the waist down, smeared herself in animal blood, and bent over a table, leaving her door ajar so that others could enter and confront the scene of an imagined crime. For \u201cMoffitt Building Piece,\u201d Mendieta poured blood on the sidewalk outside an apartment building so that it seeped to the edge of a surrounding paving stone, forming a crimson puddle. Mendieta then documented the reactions of passersby\u2014a parade of the oblivious and the curious, with none trying to intervene in the grisly scene.<\/p>\n

There is a confrontational anger in these works. Mendieta described one such piece as a \u201creaction against the idea of violence against women,\u201d and feminist critics later came to regard them as prescient commentaries on the vulnerability of women\u2019s bodies. (She was not the only female artist in the nineteen-seventies to address the issue of rape, a subject that art has traditionally stylized more than condemned; in 1977, Suzanne Lacy presented a three-week-long performance piece in Los Angeles in which she stamped reported rapes on a map each day.) During this formative period, blood became one of Mendieta\u2019s primary media. \u201cSweating Blood,\u201d which was recorded with a Super 8 camera, shows Mendieta\u2019s face in closeup. She is radiant, which makes it all the more disturbing when syrupy rivulets start trickling down her unblemished, dispassionate visage. The result is a self-portrait suggestive of images of Christ and of saintly relics\u2014central motifs in Catholicism, the religion in which Mendieta was raised. The ways Mendieta used blood were various, and not always straightforwardly suggestive of harm. She had grown up around members of her family\u2019s household staff who followed the sacrificial rituals of Santer\u00eda, the Afro-Cuban religion that combines elements of Catholicism with Yoruba practices, in which blood is regarded as a sacred force. In 1972, Mendieta alluded to such practices in \u201cChicken Movie, Chicken Piece,\u201d for which she stood naked holding a decapitated fowl, her body spattered with its blood.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Mendieta found her most potent theme by representing the female body not as a site of violence but in states of ecstatic fusion with nature. Breder once gave an account of an early gesture by Mendieta in this direction. One afternoon, she and several other graduate students gathered outside his studio. \u201cThe smell of freshly cut grass is hanging in the air,\u201d he wrote. \u201cSpontaneously, Mendieta undresses, lies on the lawn, and asks one of the students to cover her body with grass so that it blends into the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mendieta began documenting herself lying in streambeds and reclining on rocks. She stood against the trunk of a tree after slathering herself in lumpy mud, so that her body merged visually with the gnarled bark. Such works were often physically demanding to make, but resulted in sublimely beautiful effects. In \u201cGrass Breathing,\u201d from around 1975, she hid herself almost seamlessly beneath a layer of sod on a verdant lawn, causing the ground to rise and fall with the rhythm of her respiration. As her explorations progressed, Mendieta\u2019s process became less literal, and she sometimes used a body-size cutout to stamp her form into the earth. By the time she was working with the tree trunks from Italy, her representation of the human body had been reduced to an abstraction of shapes and geometries. A viewer might not even recognize the form as human.<\/p>\n

The show at the Tate Modern also emphasizes another of Mendieta\u2019s consistent themes: the sorrow of being exiled from her homeland. She depicted her separation from Cuba not as an abstract loss but as an excruciating physical tear. \u201cI am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast out from the womb,\u201d she once said. She viewed her art as \u201cthe way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the Universe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Above all, the thematic approach of the Tate Modern exhibition resists the dark pull exerted by Mendieta\u2019s biography. Placing the tree trunks scorched with gunpowder in the second gallery allows them to be enjoyed without the freight of knowing what happened to the artist soon after her return to New York from Rome. The burned trunks, as it turned out, were the last major works Mendieta produced before her sudden, violent death.<\/p>\n

Read more New York Beaches to Visit Before You Die<\/a><\/p>\n

Late in the summer of 1985, Mendieta began packing up her studio at the American Academy, readying the space for its next resident. But she intended to stay in Rome, in an apartment in a residential neighborhood not far from the Forum. The place had been rented by her husband of a few months, the minimalist American sculptor Carl Andre, who had been shuttling between Berlin and New York for much of the period that Mendieta was in Italy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Andre was among the pre\u00ebminent artists of his generation. His groundbreaking work with industrial materials, including bricks and timber arranged into geometric forms, thrilled critics despite sometimes baffling the uninitiated. The dynamic between Andre and Mendieta was charged and often fractious. Friends remarked on their tendency to argue, particularly under the influence of alcohol. In the introduction to a 2011 book about Mendieta, the critic Lucy Lippard, a friend of both artists, wrote, \u201cHer volatile alliance with Carl Andre, an old friend and political comrade of mine, was surprising, but what the hell, it seemed to work.\u201d Their wedding, held in Rome, had been a gesture of romance and optimism. And they had a fruitful aesthetic dialogue, evident in a collaboration on a limited-edition book of twenty lithographs, half of which featured images of leaves, made by Mendieta, and the other half outlines of rocks, made by Andre. But none of this could mask an underlying distrust\u2014among other things, Mendieta believed that Andre, who had been married twice before, was serially unfaithful.<\/p>\n

Before Mendieta could fully settle into the new apartment in Rome, she had to fly back to New York City to take care of some business. Andre would be there, too. About a week after she flew to America, in the early hours of September 8th, she plummeted to her death from a window of Andre\u2019s apartment, on the thirty-fourth floor of a high-rise on Mercer Street, in Greenwich Village. Andre, who was also at the apartment, was charged with her murder. Nearly two and a half years later, he was acquitted.<\/p>\n

There will undoubtedly be museumgoers at the Tate Modern whose introduction to the artist was not through her work but through a retelling of the circumstances of her death. At the time, the details were voyeuristically chronicled by the press. In December, 1985, New York<\/em> ran the headline \u201cDid Carl Andre, the Renowned Minimalist Sculptor, Hurl His Wife, a Fellow Artist, to Her Death?\u201d The magazine\u2019s cover featured a large portrait of Andre alongside a small snapshot of Mendieta. She went unnamed.<\/p>\n

In 1990, the journalist Robert Katz published \u201cNaked by the Window,\u201d a comprehensive account of the trial, which he had attended. Andre\u2019s lawyer, Jack\u00a0S. Hoffinger, had declared that the artist would take the surprising path of forgoing a jury in favor of a bench trial, in which the judge alone makes a ruling, and argued that Mendieta\u2019s death had been either an accident or a \u201csubintentional suicide\u201d under the influence of alcohol. Mendieta\u2019s friends and family thought it was preposterous to paint her as suicidal, given the many plans she had made for the future. Mendieta had even told intimates that she was gathering documentary evidence of Andre\u2019s infidelity in advance of demanding a divorce, but, to their dismay, that information was ruled hearsay, and thus could not be admitted. The forensic evidence was murky, although a doorman told the police that he\u2019d heard someone shouting \u201cNo!\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t!\u201d \u201cNaked by the Window\u201d\u2014the title is derived from an early poem by Andre\u2014has a floridity influenced by Truman Capote. In a passage attributed in an annotation to an interview that the author conducted with the judge, Alvin Schlesinger, Katz suggests that Schlesinger was ambivalent about his not-guilty verdict: \u201cOdd sort of person, Carl. He probably did it. Fifteen years was the least he would have to serve, if found guilty. Interesting case. Very close call.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNaked by the Window\u201d is out of print, but the elevation of Mendieta\u2019s posthumous reputation has given it renewed currency. The book is being adapted by the actress America Ferrera for a TV series, in which Ferrera will star. The ceaseless appetite for true-crime narratives has also driven interest in Mendieta, and \u201cNaked by the Window\u201d informed a 2022 season of the podcast \u201cDeath of an Artist,\u201d in which Helen Molesworth, a former curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, considered the life and work of both Mendieta and Andre. The podcast, which drew on Katz\u2019s recorded interviews, was thoughtful and respectful, with due consideration given by Molesworth to Mendieta\u2019s artistic career. At the same time, it fit the parameters of the true-crime genre, with Molesworth and her producer, Maria Luisa Tucker, trying to corner Andre at the apartment building on Mercer Street, where he continued to live for decades after Mendieta\u2019s death. Molesworth\u2019s discomfort is palpable: \u201cApparently, when journalists hit brick walls with e-mail and phone messages, they do something called doorstepping, which is when you literally just show up at someone\u2019s doorstep. Needless to say, they don\u2019t teach this technique in art-history class.\u201d (Molesworth never managed to speak with Andre, who died in 2024.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Mendieta\u2019s story has repeatedly been told outside the confines of galleries and museums. In a graphic novel by Christine Redfern and Caro Caron, \u201cWho Is Ana Mendieta?,\u201d published in 2011, the artist\u2019s lifeless body is shown crumpled on the roof of a deli beneath Andre\u2019s apartment. A caption notes, \u201cEerie echo of a 1973 \u2018Silueta.\u2019\u00a0\u201d A 2024 novel by Xochitl Gonzalez, \u201cAnita de Monte Laughs Last,\u201d which lightly fictionalizes Mendieta\u2019s story, is also set for a screen adaptation, to be directed by Eva Longoria.<\/p>\n

Mendieta\u2019s life and legacy have been chronicled in several documentary shorts made by Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, who is at work on a feature-length documentary that will, she hopes, provide a counternarrative to unauthorized treatments. \u201cI would like to tell her story holistically and honestly,\u201d she told me. She has also written a script for a filmed dramatization of Mendieta\u2019s life. \u201cIt\u2019s from her point of view\u2014she is telling us her story, so it\u2019s all through her eyes, like a memory,\u201d she said. Raquel explained that her ambition is to present Mendieta\u2019s work the way the artist would have wanted it to be seen\u2014which includes not dwelling on the circumstances of her death. \u201cThat\u2019s a second of her life, right?\u201d Raquel said. \u201cIt\u2019s a blip. She shouldn\u2019t be defined by something that happened to her. She should be defined by what she did.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although the Tate Modern exhibition will focus on Mendieta\u2019s art, Andre will be named, and the show will include a copy of \u201cPietre Foglie,\u201d the leaf-and-stone lithograph book the couple collaborated on. Umansky, the curator, explained that it demonstrates a creative tension between the two artists. \u201cThere are the very organic and rounded shapes of Ana, versus the very squarish shapes of Carl, and it says so much about the artistic and intellectual fights that they had, and how this confrontation is interesting,\u201d she said. \u201cAna clearly stood up to him throughout their relationship.\u201d An effective retrospective, Umansky went on, necessarily includes an account of the artist\u2019s life and practice, \u201cand everything that feeds into it is legitimate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is it ever possible to separate an appreciation of an artist\u2019s work from the facts of his or her life? This question has been much debated in recent years, particularly in the wake of the #MeToo movement, during which many revered artists were exposed as, at the very least, deeply problematic men. One of Molesworth\u2019s questions in her podcast was whether, after delving into Mendieta\u2019s death, she could continue to admire Andre\u2019s work. She concluded that, in her capacity as a museum curator, she could no longer bring herself to display it. But that didn\u2019t mean she wanted to erase Andre, and she could still acknowledge his importance in art history. Spending time thinking about Mendieta and Andre \u201chelped me realize that I wanted to be a member of a community that discusses grave and difficult things,\u201d Molesworth said in her concluding episode. \u201cIt\u2019s clear that our geniuses can do horrible things. It\u2019s clear that talent and violence can exist in the same person.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In the case of Mendieta, the question is a slightly different one: Is it possible to separate an appreciation of her work from the brutal spectacle of her death? This is particularly charged by the fact that, during the trial, Andre\u2019s lawyer defended his client by trivializing Mendieta\u2019s art, characterizing her creative themes as mere symptoms of a ghoulish obsession with death. In an outrageous line of questioning, documented by Katz, Hoffinger quizzed one witness about the theatrical aspect of Mendieta\u2019s work, implying that, consciously or not, the artist\u2019s demise was just another performance: \u201cDo you know the art where she used her own body to make impressions on the ground?\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. And the work with blood running down her face?\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Was Ana interested in the wedding of the human body with the earth?\u201d Mendieta once told an interviewer that her interest in making impressions of her body on earth could be traced to her Cuban childhood, where she learned to crawl and walk on coastal sand. It would have served Andre\u2019s lawyer less well to suggest that what inspired Mendieta\u2019s practice was, quite literally, a day at the beach.<\/p>\n

Given this historical context\u2014and given how the tragic early deaths of female artists, from Sylvia Plath to Francesca Woodman to Marilyn Monroe to Amy Winehouse, are often framed in ways that diminish their accomplishments\u2014it\u2019s understandable that the custodians of Mendieta\u2019s legacy have sought to discourage readings of her work that begin with her life\u2019s end. Months in advance of the Tate Modern show, the Mendieta estate issued a pre\u00ebmptive strike, in the form of a document titled \u201cFact Sheet<\/em>.\u201d It stated, \u201cAna Mendieta\u2019s death does not define her, or her art. Her tragic death is often used as a means for sensationalism and clickbait, but it is not remotely related to how she created her art, nor was her art predestined or shaped by her death in any way, shape or form.\u201d In this document, you can sense an anticipatory weariness at the inevitable regurgitation of gory details. In an interview two years ago with the Times<\/em>, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta asked, \u201cHow many times does she have to fall?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Even among those who cherish Mendieta\u2019s art, there has been a tendency to present her as an emblem of the way women are abused by men\u2014an approach that results in a similar foregrounding of the circumstances of her death. In the past dozen years, museum shows featuring Andre\u2019s work at Dia Beacon, at MOCA<\/em>, and at the Tate Modern have drawn protesters holding posters reading \u201cWhere is Ana Mendieta?\u201d The implication is that the ongoing veneration of Andre\u2019s art is an example of the establishment\u2019s unregenerate prioritizing of the male and the white over the female and the brown. (Although Andre continued to have a successful career after the trial, his reputation was indelibly marked by it; when he died, the first line of his Times<\/em> obituary referred to \u201cthe accusation that he played a role in the death\u201d of Mendieta.)<\/p>\n

For some admirers of Mendieta, such a framing characterizes her foremost as Andre\u2019s victim. Coco Fusco, a Cuban American artist twelve years Mendieta\u2019s junior, told me, \u201cI am of the belief that he probably did throw her out the window, but at the same time I don\u2019t think there\u2019s anything to be gained in terms of understanding her work by making that the most important thing to talk about.\u201d Fusco prefers to focus on, say, the links Mendieta forged between American and Cuban artists once she started returning to her homeland, in the early eighties, or the urgent ways in which Mendieta drew upon Afro-Cuban syncretic faiths to express herself. \u201cI think it\u2019s more relevant to think about it in terms of the relationship to her life experience, which was very traumatic in many ways, and in some ways emblematic,\u201d Fusco said.<\/p>\n

Of course, artists and their estates can\u2019t control how a body of work will be received by viewers. And it would not serve Mendieta\u2019s art to avert the critical gaze entirely from the ways her work does tackle the subject of death. After all, she did stage a fake murder, lie in a tomb, and repeatedly douse her body in blood. Throughout her lifetime, her work was seen as a meditation on violence, especially against women, and it would likely have continued to be seen that way even if Mendieta had lived a long life with a peaceful end. The enduring attraction of \u201cBody Tracks\u201d lies in its suggestive openness to multiple interpretations. The work can be read as a commentary on the act of mark-making. It is equally reasonable for a viewer to look at the stains of blood dragged down the wall and shudder at what the work says about the frailty of the human body and its subjection to the irresistible force of gravity. \u201cIm\u00e1gen de Y\u00e1gul,\u201d the work in which Mendieta inserted her own body into a tomb and decked herself with flowers, was explicitly a way for the artist to tie herself to the ancients and to history\u2014to the living and the dead, to death and rebirth, to the common fate of every body. Mortality was among Mendieta\u2019s subjects, just as water, fire, earth, and air were among her materials.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI don\u2019t think that you can separate death and life,\u201d Mendieta told Linda Montano, an American performance artist, in an interview published in the late eighties. \u201cAll of my work is about those two things\u2014it\u2019s about Eros and life and death.\u201d Following Mendieta\u2019s demise, Ida Panicelli, her curator friend in Rome, went to her studio at the American Academy to assess Mendieta\u2019s belongings. Amid packed boxes, she found an experiment under way, in which Mendieta had encased part of a prickly-pear cactus in wax. The encasement was humid, and a single bud had pushed its way through the waxen tomb and into the light of the studio. \u201cI said, \u2018My God, she\u2019s here,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Panicelli told me. \u201cIt was like feeling her presence\u2014still there, nurturing a sculpture.\u201d Like the best of Mendieta\u2019s tragically truncated body of work, this unfinished piece had a fragility and an ephemerality, as well as a resilient fortitude. Panicelli added, \u201cIt was something very close to death in the work, and incredibly close to life.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more The Best Beach Reads for When You Left Your Book at Home<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Four decades after her death, Mendieta\u2019s bold work is finally being appreciated on its own terms. Rebecca Mead meets with a curator behind a major new exhibition, in London.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":895,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-onward-and-upward-with-the-arts"],"yoast_head":"\nAna Mendieta, the Body Artist - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=896\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ana Mendieta, the Body Artist - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Four decades after her death, Mendieta\u2019s bold work is finally being appreciated on its own terms. 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