Ana Mendieta: Cuban Artist
Created | Updated Jul 30, 2003
The artists Ana Mendieta was born in Habana, Cuba, in a rather well to do family.
During the rise of the Castro regime in the early 1960s, she immigrated from Cuba to the United States with her sister Raquel, following a program sponsored by the Catholic Church (“Exodus”), which allowed ‘students of eligible age’ to enter the U.S.
Upon their arrival to the U.S., Ana and her sister were sent to foster homes and similar repositories for youths. Having become full-fledged citizens of the U.S., the girls went to college- Anna attending the University of Iowa, which had a surprisingly solid art program that captivated the budding artist.
Mendieta’s early approaches to art could be considered revolutionary, even in their roughest forms. She was especially intrigued in challenging the established materials of art: Canvas, paint, paper, etc, and instead explore a great range of unused and disregarded materials, such as the human body. The human body had been generally regarded as one of the most important components of artistic works, as a subject. It was Ana who decided to experiment with the human body as a tool for creative expression, where it was not only the objective of the work but also the means of execution itself. The first record of her conscious work as a means of expression is 1973. An incident of rape and murder that had occurred on the Iowa campus, and Ana wanted to protest the campus administration’s approach to the issue (the usual hush-hush approach and in general bad PR).
Friends and fellow students were invited to her apartment, where they found stretched out and tied up – her almost-nude body smeared in blood. The curator Charles Merewether explains Mendieta’s approach as her way of "naming rape, that is, not only breaking the code of silence surrounding it, but its anonymity and generality."
It is very important to underline the presence of blood in this work and many more works to come (such as Body Trails). Ana grew up in Cuba where the strange and fascinating amalgam of staunch Catholicism and mysterious Voodoo (or Voudoun) received the name of Santeria. It generally integrated the strong Christian iconographic tradition with the rituals and beliefs of the African-originated religion. Ana was very much exposed to this as a kid thanks to her old nannies- normally mature-to-elderly countrywomen who would sit in the afternoon and converse about these matters among themselves: who required a love philter, who had been ojeado (cursed), who needed a limpia (ritualistic cleansing), and so on and so forth.
Ana Mendieta’s early experimentations (roughly 1972-1978) involved a lot of cosmetic refinement and elaboration. Challenging both physical expectations as well as throwing subtle hints at gender roles, she would utilize makeup, glass, and sometimes even shampoo to modify her upper body into different and controversial configurations, assuming different personalities and stances throughout her photographed works. Her video experiments are much more theatrical in their span: They feature a symbolic plot and timeline: the life of a particular piece she had conceived.
At the start of 1975 her body-centered art found a new height: the production of the “Silueta” series, in which she imprints of her own body merged in the landscape. Some critics have drawn parallels between her Siluetas and the early work of feminist artists that sought to reestablish the link between the female form and the Mother Earth figure. Mendieta, however, had different concept behind her work. She had apparently been fascinated by the concept of “Mythical Geology” as well as the Rupestrean art and it was this that she sought to achieve in her works. We quote her saying: "It was during my childhood in Cuba that I first became fascinated by primitive art and cultures. It seems as if these cultures are provided with an inner knowledge, a closeness to natural resources. And it is this knowledge which gives reality to the images they have created. This sense of magic, knowledge and power found in primitive art has influenced my personal attitude toward art-making."
"For the past twelve years I have been working out in nature, exploring the relationship between myself, the earth and art. I have thrown myself into the very elements that produced me, using the earth as my canvas and my soul as my tools"
Therefore we have Ana Mendieta eagerly exploring not only her identification to the earth and her body, but also the past patrimony of humanity, the first instances of art (that may or may not have served a strictly mystical or ceremonial purpose upon its conception). Working diligently, Ana Mendieta elaborated 200 of these sculpted silhouettes in more than 80 short films.
Soon afterwards, and related, was the Volcanic series, in which the groove that houses the body is deeper and filled with ash and hot embers. The primordial fire that seems to burn inside these primitive silhouettes of women can also be appreciated in her previous recorded piece, “Anima” (from the latin “Breath”, which is our equivalent of soul).
The execution of Anima was flawless and showed a tremendous amount of detail to the structure of drama within an art piece (if it was planned indeed, and not an occurrence, which may be a possibility): The fiery silhouette is brought alight and slowly it consumes itself, until the last flame surviving within her- soon to extinguish- is that which represents the heart.
Closer to her last years, Mendieta worked on "Rupestrian" sculptures (1981-85), a series of stone carvings that literally emerged from the mold of "Siluetas." The location of these works is Jaruco Park, outside of Havana. In the petreous forms that compose these pieces one can easily identify the almost-amorphous but suggestive shapes of human bodies and fertility symbols of prehistory. According to scholars, the features of this Rupestrian art are:”
-Guanaroca (the First Woman)
-Bacaya (the Light of Day)
-Guacar (Menstruation)
-Atabey (the Mother of the Waters, similar to Yemandja)
Seemingly, these entities are represented by simple petroglyphic shapes that share a strong identification with the goddess carvings of the Dordogne region in France. Before she died, the artist was planning two book projects, one to consist of photo-etchings of the "Rupestrian" carvings, the other to include drawings inspired by the myths of the Tainos.
In 1985 Ana Mendieta married Carl André, a sculptor. In a tragic accident that has passed on to posterity under the guises of scandal and possible homicide, Mendieta died after falling thirty-four flights from her apartment window. Her husband was charged with and tried for the murder of Ana Mendieta, he was acquitted of his wife's death in February 1988.
Her death marked the end of a prosperous and creative career, where she pushed the boundaries of expression as one of the early members of the true exploring artists: She challenged not only the concept of what a piece of work should be, but also what materials are deemed acceptable, as well as the use of the artist’s own body as his or her paintbrush.
