Ana Mendieta
Trigger Warning: small discussion of rape, suicide or homicide. Please take care while reading. A small biography of Ana Mendieta. She died very young. But she was influential to feminist art!
Ana Mendieta works include elements of earth art, process art, and performance art. She is of Cuban origin. Born in 1948 and died in 1985 at the age of 34. She left a legacy of very important work such as the Silueta Series. In this series, she relates the female body to nature, the earth, and the cycle of rebirth. There are a series of imprints of the artist's body, hence the name silhouettes, often into the Earth to join the artist's body to the Earth. There a general interpretation of her work as she focuses on her connection to nature on the Earth. Ana Mendieta started in Iowa. She was born in Cuba and along with her sister (12 years old), she was taken to the US for safekeeping. Her mother and father were politically active but on the wrong side of Fidel Castro. They were afraid for the girls' safety. Along with 14,000 other Cuban children in this operation, Peter Pan was brought to orphanages in the United States. Ana and her sister happened to be brought to Dubuque, Iowa where her work started in Iowa. She was raised in different orphanages in Iowa and then finally when she came of age, she attended the University of Iowa. About 5 or 6 years later, her mother joined and then 18 years later, her father was released from prison. Her father was a political prisoner and was able to join the family in the United States. These are 2 of her silhouette series in Iowa, although the series started in Mexico. She did a number of these pieces in riverbeds around Iowa then photographically documented them. What we have from this series is a photographic documentation. Many of these photographs are large almost life-size. She records the Earth as a site that becomes too light for her. The Earth is regenerative but it also obscure and subsumes. She wants us to focus on the female nature relationship and the regenerative aspects. The series started in 1973 and continued to 1980.
When Ana Mendieta attended the University of Iowa, she had the good fortune to run into a progressive teacher, Hans Brenner. He offered a multimedia class in which he took members of the class to Oaxaca, Mexico. Ana Mendieta was moved by this experience of visiting Mexico and particularly the joining of the old and new worlds; reminding her of Cuba. She was moved to make the first in the Silueta series which is a combination of Earth art and Performance art. It is also about the process and the materials she uses. They have a short life, and so we focus on the shortened process. She is blending art, making traditions. She also did performance pieces about the rape of a friend that she knew in her college. She did a lot of moving pieces. In her Silueta series there is a print of her body You can see the head, the arms raised, and then the torso and legs. Typically, when she leaves the depression, she fills it with some natural materials such as colored leaves, flowers, or something else that has an ephemeral nature to it which identifies her outline, as seen above.
Unfortunately, she was in the apartment with her husband, Carl Andre, the minimalist artist. They were reported to having an intense argument and no one knows exactly what happened. She either hurled herself out of the window, or was thrown where she ended up falling 34 floors and died. It is one of the art world's mysteries as to what caused that. She made important work for the feminist cause and helped advance the art that feminists made that expanded on this theme of the feminine and nature.
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