Ana Mendieta: When Life Imitates Art

The last newsletter for 2023

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. —Ana Mendieta

In February of 1973, a young nursing student named Sarah Ann Otten was found raped and brutally murdered in her dorm room at the University of Iowa, her head and neck so swollen from being beaten with a broom handle that she suffocated. In an odd act of post mortem care, her killer washed Sarah Ann’s hair and face in the sink, leaving bloody water behind as he placed her facedown on the bed. The story sent shockwaves through the quiet college town.

A month later, at the same school, a young art student named Ana Mendieta (b. 1948, Cuba) invited classmates over to her apartment. Upon arrival, they found her door ominously ajar. When they entered, confused and worried, I imagine, there Mendieta was: Naked from the waist down, her ass in the air and face against the bed. Her arms were bound and she was covered in blood, traces of which were also found in her bathroom sink. Mimicking every detail the press had reported about Sarah Ann’s murder, Mendieta didn’t move from her copied positioning; in fact, she stayed in her face-plant pose for over an hour while the classmates sat on her apartment floor and discussed what they had come to realize was a surprise performance (Mendieta liked to call these actions, inspired by the language of the Viennese Actionists, a short-lived performance art movement of the 1960s, which counted violence, transgressive body politics and lack of commercialism among its defining characteristics. Actions were also conceptually related to happenings, Yoko Ono’s scores, and to Schneeman’s kinetic theatre.) Mendieta’s action was recorded in photographs (one such photo sits in the collection of the Tate, London) and Mendieta named it Untitled (Rape Scene), 1973.

Rape Scene , 1973. Suite of five estate color photographs, 20 × 16 inches

Blood often played a role in Mendieta’s work, it just wasn’t always in the context of violence towards women. Sometimes it was inspired by the natural environment, or the traditions of her birth country. Until the age of twelve, Ana enjoyed a privileged upbringing in Havana, part of a well-off and politically connected family. In 1961, her parents sent her and her older sister to America as part of a US government and Catholic charity-run exchange program, hoping that political tensions would die down in a few months and the girls could return home. Instead, the Missile Crisis of ‘62 followed the Bay of Pigs invasion in April of ‘61, and the sisters remained first in an orphanage and then in a series of foster care homes in Iowa. Eventually, both parents were able to join them in America; her father spent eighteen years as a political prisoner in Cuba beforehand. 

Cuba’s natural beauty, agrarian culture, and the practice of Santeria—an African diasporic religion emphasizing polytheism, ancestor veneration, offerings of stones, flowers, and other natural elements, and rituals related to animal sacrifice—became huge inspirations to Mendieta’s art practice. She often utilized organic materials and her own body to reinforce ideas akin to nature being a feminine, maternal source. “My art is grounded in the belief in one universal energy which runs through all beings and matter, all space and time,” she said. This energy is evident in the Silueta Series, made from 1973-1985, in which Mendieta staged performances in natural landscapes, covering her body in organic materials, and documented the imprints she left behind, the shapes perhaps a metaphor for the traces of herself left in Cuba, or in all of those foster homes. 

Untitled (Image from Yagul), August 1973 (original slide), 1991 (posthumous print).

Her work parallels movements like Earthwork, or Land Art, whose largest champions were often male (Robert Smithson is a prime example), but by adding in the presence and evidence of her own body, she transformed the genre into something more personal, more political. “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.” She often named her works after deities of Santeria and of Mayan religion, such as Ix Chel, the Mayan mother of the gods, patron saint of women, and goddess of pregnancy and birth.

Rastros Corporales (Body Tracks), one of three works, 1982, blood and tempera on paper 

By 1985, Ana Mendieta had graduated from University of Iowa and moved to New York City. While in school, she’d become the lover of her art teacher Hans Breder–a well known German-American artist, 14 years her senior, who’d established a pioneering interdisciplinary arts department at the university. She had a solo exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery, the first all-female artists cooperative in Manhattan, in 1979, and after nineteen years in exile, Mendieta returned to Cuba in the early 80s, creating photo etchings of sculptures she made in ancient caves. She spent the rest of her life making films, usually documenting the earth works she made based on her female form.  There was a fantastic drawing series called Tracks, works on paper she painted with animal blood. In January of 1985, she married the famous minimalist sculptor Carl Andre in a private ceremony in Rome. And in September of ‘85, she fell thirty-three stories to her death from her Greenwich Village bedroom window, landing loudly on the roof of a deli. 

When the cops arrived, Andre handed them his Guggenheim retrospective catalogue as a form of boastful identification. The recording of his 911 call said the following: “...we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, eh, exposed to the public than she was. And she went to the bedroom, and I went after her, and she went out the window.” After a short, jury-less trial, Andre was acquitted, and would find himself honored by major museum exhibitions at the Stedelijk, The Netherlands, and MoMA, New York, in the subsequent decade.