Ana Mendieta was born on 18 November 1948 in Havana. Even as a child, she had a great interest in nature, dividing her time between the capital of Cuba and the wild coast where her grandparents lived. In 1960, the familial problems with the government began, with her father Ignacio’s refusal to enter the Communist Party. The following year, the Mendieta family decided to send their daughters to safety in the United States, whereas Ana and her sister had started to become involved in counter-revolutionary activities. This was the start of a long separation, among a series of host families. In 1966, while her father had been arrested and imprisoned, the rest of the family emigrated in turn, and joined the two sisters in the United States, to settle in Iowa. Immediately enrolled in the state university, Ana began her studies, including a class in primitive art. She first completed a diploma in painting, but very quickly became interested in conceptual art. In 1970, she began her first performances by participating in a seminar by Robert Wilson on movement and awareness of the body. She obtained her American citizenship, which allowed her to start a series of travels, especially to Mexico, which she experienced as a return to her roots. She was very influenced by the work and personality of Frida Kahlo. The year 1972 was a key period for her work. After completing her masters’ degree in painting with a series of self-portraits on the theme of sexual identity, she gave up painting to devote herself exclusively to performance and to natural materials. “I had to go to the source of life, to Mother Nature.” Even if her work did not innovate in the avant-gardist forms of her era, she fully re-appropriated them, questioning the female body and the idea of the goddess, symbol of creation and of nature. Her first performances are explicitly related to violence against women, acted out with murders and rapes that she represented in front of students and photographers, highlighting the voyeurism systematically associated with the presence of a naked female body.

In 1975, Lucy Lippard, who spoke at the University of Iowa, included Mendieta in an article, thus providing her with her first national visibility. She diversified her Siluetas series, the act of tracing the contour of her body on the ground, which she had started the previous year, by using new materials like snow, ice, straw and stone. Documented through photographs, her “siluetas” were artistic acts that were just as magical as they were political. This act of appropriation of a piece of land ritualised a communion with the world. After the pain of exile, she perceived this gesture as an act of reconciliation with nature, a link between her new land and her homeland. Mendieta was raised as a Catholic, but it was in Mexico that her religious and Pre-Columbian references were to be combined, accentuating the notion of ritual. She was very interested in the Santeria religion that is very important in Cuba – a Catholicised version of the African Yoruba religion – with its cosmic vision, preaching a very strong belief in the world of the spirits of nature. She sees the earth as a living organism and wants to be united with it. The materials used in her works are chosen for their magical character. In the use of blood, we can see a direct link with the practices of the Santéria cult, particularly in the 1972 performance Death of A Chicken, in which she decapitates the bird and holds it by the feet until its blood spurts over her naked body. While the notion of the female victim haunted her early work, she later moved towards a search for spirituality and connection with nature, through the connection to primitive practices. The enclosure of the gallery became a religious, wild space, but unlike the Viennese Actionists or the body art movement, the reference was tribal more than it was Catholic, thus connecting it to her roots in the developing world.

In 1978, she left Iowa for New York, further integrating herself within the artistic community of the east coast, and becoming a member of the A.I.R. Gallery, the feminist gallery of New York, where she also got involved in theory, organising one of the first talks on Latin American woman artists, then an exhibition on the isolation of women artists in developing countries. It was this theme that would lead her to break away from this organisation several years later. In 1979, during one of the many discussions at A.I.R, she met Carl Andre, whom she would later marry in Rome in 1985. A desire for a return to her roots led her to meet with the expatriate Cuban community, and in 1980 she made her first return voyage to Cuba since her emigration in 1961, bringing back with her a sample of its earth and sand. Torn between her two cultures, she made several works in Cuba, but also for “Little Havana”, the Cuban neighbourhood in Miami. This return to her past strengthened her keen interest in primitive art, which she remembered having enjoyed from a very young age.

“I am not interested in the formal qualities of my materials, but rather in their emotional and sensual qualities.” We can draw comparisons between her approach and the tropes of several major movements of the era, whether it be Minimalism, for the serial aspect, Anti-form, for the use of organic materials, or Land Art, for her in-situ placement. However, while the spirit of the age tended to break away from the institution and the gallery, Mendieta hardly took any notice of this, as she had used photography and film from the outset to record and communicate her ephemeral interventions. The desire to be a recognised Latin American woman artist was an important motivation, all the more so since the feminist artistic scene was exclusively white and middle class.

In 1983, she obtained a residency for one year at the American Academy in Rome, where she started studio work again. She visited Europe with Carl Andre, in residence in Berlin at the same time. Several months after her wedding, on 8 September 1985, Ana died in a fall from the 34th storey of the apartment that she shared with her husband. First accused of murder, Carl Andre was acquitted several months later; her death was thenceforth considered suicide. Two years after her death, the first retrospective of Ana Mendieta’s work was held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.

Patricia Maincent