THE UNPUBLISHED WORKS
OF ANA MENDIETA
OLGA VISO
PRESTEL
MUNICH BERLIN LONDON NEW YORK
UNSEENMENDIETA
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Cover: Documentation of Feathers on Woman, 1972 (Iowa). Detail of 35 mm color slide
Back cover: Documentation of an untitled performance with flowers, ca. 1973 (Intermedia studio, University of Iowa). Detail of 35 mm black-and-white photo negatives
Page 1: Untitled (detail), c. 1978. Blank book burnt with branding iron, 13 3⁄16 x 11 1⁄4 in. overall. Collection Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections, purchased with funds from Rose F. Rosenfield and the Edmundson Art Foundation, Inc.
Frontispiece: Ana Mendieta (foreground) and Hans Breder in a field of flowers, Old Man’s Creek, Sharon Center, Iowa, 1977. Detail of 35 mm color slide
© Prestel Verlag, Munich · Berlin · London · New York, 2008© for the text, © Olga M. Viso, 2008© for the illustrations, © Estate of Ana Mendieta, 2008All photographs of works by Ana Mendieta are courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York, unless otherwise indicated.
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Editorial direction: Christopher LyonDesign, layout, and typesetting: Holzwarth DesignOrigination: ReproLine MediateamProduction: Simone ZeebPrinted and bound by Passavia Druckservice GmbH
Printed on acid-free paper
ISBN 978-3-7913-3966-5
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CONTENTS
7 BEYOND THE VISIBLE
14 CHRONOLOGY
22 INTERMEDIA
77 THE LURE OF MEXICO
109 RITUALS OF REBIRTH
153 PURIFYING FLAME
199 ISLANDS
229 ANCESTRAL RETURN
279 IN THE PUBLIC REALM
296 ARTIST STATEMENTS
300 ADDITIONAL READING
301 PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS
302 INDEX
304 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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BEYOND THE VISIBLE
Opposite: Rastros Corporales (Body Tracks), 1982. Blood and tempera paint on paper; one of three works, each 38 x 50 in.
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass., Rose Purchase Fund7
Ana Mendieta produced some of the most compelling images
of body- and identity-oriented art of the 1970s. The tracks
made by the artist dragging her blood-covered arms down a
wall, and the pigment-filled void of her silhouette pressed into
a sandy beach, consumed by advancing waves, resound in the
histories of feminist art, performance, and land art. Other
potent images—Mendieta’s bodily outline drawn by ignited
gunpowder on the earth, or set alight with fireworks against
the night sky, fetishistic goddess and mummiform shapes
molded in soil and adorned with flowers, and ritualistic actions
per formed by the artist using animal blood and feathers—
are icons of art of the 1970s and late twentieth-century art of
Latin America. Mendieta the artist, and the art she pro -
duced during a brief yet prolific career covering a thirteen-year
period (1972 to 1985), have often defied easy classification.
Working across media (live performance, film, photography,
and sculpture) and between cultures (North America, Central
America, the Caribbean, and Europe), Mendieta vehemently
resisted being labeled Hispanic, Latina, or feminist, or de-
scribed as solely a performer, sculptor, photographer, or con-
ceptual artist. She was an artist first and foremost, one with
a transcultural identity and multimedia sensibility, who
explored complex issues of human sexuality and identity. Her
art emerged before the critical language employed today to
describe such an interdisciplinary and hybrid practice had
fully evolved.
Body Tracks, 1974 (Intermedia Studio, University of Iowa).
Lifetime color photograph from 35 mm color slide,
10 x 8 in. Collection Igor da Costa
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8
Resisting the terminology that she felt the art world
establishment tried to impose on her, Mendieta developed her
own vocabulary to describe her approach to art-making. She
used the term “earth-body work” to describe her performance-
based actions in the landscape, which she documented on
Super 8 mm film and in 35 mm still photography. Such terms
recognized the hybrid nature of her practice after 1974—
her particular fusion of performance/body art and land/earth
art. Although Mendieta’s mature work was “performative”
(it was time-based and ephemeral), the artist did not consider
her art to be “performance” in a strict sense; she did not re-
quire an audience or public platform for the work to be activat-
ed or com pleted. Indeed, Mendieta was not drawn to the
improvisational energy of live performance, nor was she inter-
ested in the kind of audience interaction it afforded. She had
experimented with live performance as a graduate student at
the University of Iowa in the early 1970s and preferred to
execute her sculptural tableaux and actions in nature and in
private. She would doc ument these performance-based works
using film and would then share that documentation with
audiences.
The language Mendieta evolved to describe her art also
recognized the syncretic nature of her practice, one that freely
borrowed archetypal symbols from a variety of cultures as
well as her own mixed heritage as a Cuban American. The
artist was especially interested in Amerindian and Afro-Cuban
tra ditions and the indigenous cultures of Mexico, a country
she viewed as a surrogate homeland before her return to Cuba
in 1981 after eighteen years of exile. Mendieta felt strongly
that these cultural references and free appropriations placed
her work outside of both modern and emergent postmodern
tra ditions. She stated in 1984, “My works do not belong to
the modernist tradition. . . . Nor is [my art] akin to the commer-
cially historical-self-conscious assertions of what is called post -
mod ernism.”1 Despite Mendieta’s attempts to clarify her art
and identity, her work and contributions to late- twentieth- cen -
tury art were often misunderstood. The tragic circum stances
surrounding Mendieta’s untimely death at age thirty-six helped
perpetuate misperceptions of her work during the following
decades.
On September 8, 1985, Mendieta fell from a window
of an apartment on the thirty-fourth floor of a high-rise
building in New York City that she shared with her husband,
the well-known American sculptor Carl Andre. In the years
following her death, Andre was tried for her murder and ulti-
mately acquitted, but the incident polarized the American
art world (and the New York art community in particular) for
well over a decade.2 The characterization of the artist in the
media as an aggressive feminist Latina who anticipated her
own death, through her body-oriented art and fascination with
“occult” rituals, reflected the myriad power imbalances then
operative in the art world—imbalances between men and
women, whites and minorities, “first-” and “third-world”
nations, established and emerging artists, privileged individuals
and the disenfranchised—which were especially pronounced
in the United States during the years of Ronald Reagan’s presi -
dency. The scandal around Mendieta’s death also erupted
during a period in contemporary culture dominated by discus-
sions about center versus periphery, early debates about multi-
culturalism, and growing awareness of an emerging global
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9
culture. Through the 1990s, aspects of Mendieta’s life and her
art were frequently made to serve the personal, political, and
social agendas of others—Andre’s defense attorneys, factions
of the New York art world, women’s groups and feminist coali-
tions, and art and cultural historians. In this charged critical
landscape, the integrity of Mendieta’s art, her evolution as an
artist, and her place within a broader context of art than that
defined under the rubrics of feminism and multiculturalism,
remained relatively unexplored.3
A complete picture of Mendieta’s production as an artist
was obscured until the late 1990s not only by an unfavorable
critical climate, but also by limited access to the full range of
Mendieta’s visual production because of the need to organize
her archive and preserve original photographic materials.
The sudden death of Mendieta, who had no formal gallery
representation, had left a devastated family uncertain of how to
manage her estate and legacy. The archive of her work com-
prised thousands of 35 mm slides, eighty-one Super 8 film
reels, hundreds of printed photographs, black-and-white nega-
tives, and contact sheets, as well as loose drawings, sketch-
books, and correspondence, in a state of relative disarray.
Mendieta was, after all, an emerging artist who was establish-
ing her career. Consumed by the trial of Carl Andre, the
Mendieta family did not begin to comprehensively assess the
contents of the archive until after Galerie Lelong in New York
assumed representation of the estate in 1991. At that point,
scholars began to investigate Mendieta’s legacy, and a growing
number of Mendieta’s works were made available to the public
through exhibition, publication, and the production of a
posthumous photographic edition of twenty images of Siluetas
made by the artist in Iowa and Mexico in the 1970s.4 For well
over a decade after Mendieta’s death, her art was known and
understood primarily through these photographic prints and
a selection of drawings and sculptures presented in a survey
exhibition organized by the New Museum of Contemporary
Art, New York, in 1988.5
It was not until the mid-1990s that works created at the
University of Iowa in the early 1970s by the artist, including
photographs and short films of live actions and studio per for -
mances, were seen. The avid interest of scholars researching
Mendieta, including the American art historian Julia P.
Herzberg and Spanish curator Gloria Moure, led Galerie
Lelong to provide greater access to the archive by organizing
the artist’s inventory of 35 mm slides in 1998–99. Complete
rolls of date-stamped slides made by the artist between
1971 and 1983 were gathered and put in chronological order,
revealing the artist’s working process and method of re cord ing,
selecting, and editing the image documentation of her time-
based actions in the studio, architectural settings, and in
nature. In early 2000, the Mendieta family and Lelong also
began to restore the eighty-one Super 8 films in the archive,
a process that is ongoing. This expanded archive informed
Moure’s pioneering survey of the artist’s work organized by
the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de
Compostela, Spain, in 1996; Herzberg’s 1998 doctoral disser -
tation on the artist; and my research for the 2004 touring
retrospective exhibition that I organized for the Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., which
included for the first time a significant presentation of
Mendieta’s independent film works.6
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10
These projects and subsequent investigations led to
a reevaluation of Mendieta’s art over the past decade. Now
Mendieta’s contributions to the evolution of major interna-
tional movements in art of the 1970s, including feminist art,
conceptual photography, and land art, are more fully recog-
nized. Mendieta has joined the roster of performance-based
artists of her own generation—Marina Abramovic, Rebecca
Horn, Adrian Piper and Hannah Wilke—and that of her
immediate predecessors active in performance and environ -
mental art: Vito Acconci, Hans Breder, Joan Jonas, Richard
Long, Bruce Nauman, Hélio Oiticica, Dennis Oppenheim,
Carolee Schneemann, Nancy Spero, and Robert Smithson,
among others. We have a deeper understanding of Mendieta’s
pio neering work as an intermedia artist, who did not see the
need for hierarchies of media or form in defining artistic
practice. Her actions, captured in photographs and films, her
sculptures, and her drawings all provide rich ways to experi-
ence her art.
Despite the growing recognition of Mendieta’s art over
the last ten years, a great deal of her production remains un -
seen. Hundreds of earth-body works produced between 1972
and 1985, which she documented in 35 mm slides, black-and-
white photography, and Super 8 film, have never been pub-
lished and remain unknown even to knowledgeable scholars
of contemporary art.7 These unseen Mendietas, in which the
artist is shown performing or inscribing her silhouette with an
array of pigments, gunpowder mixtures, and local rock, earth,
and plant materials, represent some of the most breathtaking
and ethereal works of her career. In addition to the slides,
there are hundreds of black-and-white photographic negatives
and contact sheets that document unknown sculptural works
produced in the early 1980s, along with sketchbooks and
proposals for public works, all unseen and many unrealized.
The fact that these works have remained hidden is not sur -
prising; in most instances, Mendieta had not resolved how to
present these works publicly. This is partly because she lacked
exhibition opportunities and financial resources to have prints
of her photographs made or public works realized. In most
cases, the unseen works presented here exist solely as visual
documentation—slides, photographic negatives, film stills
and reels, and drawings—and written project proposals.
Over the last decade, the artist’s representatives, as
well as curators including the author, have struggled with
how best to present this unseen aspect of Mendieta’s produc-
tion. Post humous selections of images have been made into
limit ed photographic editions by Galerie Lelong, a practice
with precedents in the field of photography. In the case of
Men dieta, however, such a practice, though done judiciously,
may be frowned upon by art historians and critics knowl -
edgeable about the work and concerned by a lack of clarity
regarding the degree to which the artist’s intent may be re -
flected in decisions about which images to print. A given
earth-body work, for example, may be documented by one
or two, or as many as thirty-eight related slides or negatives;
it remains unclear in many instances whether the artist, if
given the opportunity, would have chosen to print any of the
images. There are few notations on the slides or test prints in
the archive to verify the artist’s intentions. While there are
precedents in her art that might provide some guidance, such
decisions remain fraught with speculation and uncer tainty.
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Documentation of an untitled work from the Silueta series, 1976 (La Ventosa, Mexico). 35 mm color slide. Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York11
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12
It should be noted that in the few instances of Mendieta’s art
being posthumously published, the artist’s in ten tions are much
clearer. Notations on slides and evidence of dupli ca tion and
test printing indicate Mendieta’s aesthetic prefe rences and
choices. Still, the bulk of Mendieta’s experi menta tion and pro -
duction has remained unseen because of these dilemmas.
This volume is thus an earnest attempt by the author
to bring to light the rich body of Mendieta’s unseen works in
a manner that respects the integrity of the artist’s practice.
Drawn from the full extent of her archive, the images pre -
sented here were filmed or photographed by Mendieta unless
otherwise indicated.8 My aim is to make available more of
the artist’s prolific production and reveal her tremendous spirit
of experimentation and demanding and rigorous methods.
Mendieta’s careful planning and execution of her pieces, her
relationship to the locations in which she executed them, and
the manner in which she composed and documented her
actions in nature can really only be understood by exploring
the full extent of the archive, which includes many views of
works in progress and field notations. Hundreds of completely
unknown images are reproduced in this book as well as pre -
viously unpublished views of more familiar pieces, in cluding
Rape Scene and People Looking at Blood, Moffitt, both 1973
(pages 55–59 and 47–53), which deepen our understanding of
these unsettling sculptural tableaux and the artist’s intentions
in creating them.
The selection of more than two hundred unseen works
presented here is organized in seven thematic groupings, each
arranged in a roughly chronological sequence. “Intermedia”
surveys Mendieta’s experiments with live performance as a grad-
uate student in the early 1970s. It considers her relationship
to Intermedia, an artistic movement of the 1960s and early
1970s to which the artist was introduced through the Univer -
sity of Iowa’s Intermedia Department and Center for New Per -
forming Arts, which had recently been founded by the artist’s
mentor and partner Hans Breder, together with other univer -
sity colleagues.9 There Mendieta experimented with a variety
of performance-based practices before her own earth-body art
took form. “The Lure of Mexico” explores the importance of
Mexico in the development of Mendieta’s signature Silueta
series, made between 1973 and 1981, and includes works made
in Mexico, Iowa, upstate New York, and Cuba. “Rituals of
Rebirth” considers the significance of funerary themes in the
evolution of Mendieta’s art and traces the artist’s fascination
with burial customs across cultures and particularly in the
Valley of Oaxaca , which she frequented in summer during the
1970s. “Purifying Flame” examines the artist’s experiments
with fire and gunpowder between 1976 and 1981, when she
repeatedly exploded the outline of her silhouette and more
generalized female goddess forms in a variety of locations in
nature across the country. “Islands” considers Mendieta’s use
of the island as a metaphor for her own body as well as her
experience of exile from Cuba. “Ancestral Return” traces the
evolution of Mendieta’s practice after the culmination of her
Silueta series in 1981 and her embrace in subsequent works
of more universal themes related to cultural history and ances-
try. “In the Public Realm” presents documentation of her
public art projects from 1978 to 1985, all for locations in the
United States. It includes project proposals, renderings, and
maquettes for public works, some never realized. This final
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Creek #2, 1974 (San Felipe, Mexico).
Still from Super 8 color silent film
13
chapter suggests Mendieta’s potential evolution as an artist
had she lived beyond her thirty-six years.
The sketchbook pages reproduced in this book show
how Mendieta translated her ideas and research into realized
works of art. They confirm that Mendieta’s works were gener-
ally not spontaneous actions, but well-planned and thought -
fully executed endeavors. The selection of photographs shows
that Mendieta developed variations on her Siluetas and often
returned, year after year, to favorite work sites, such as Old
Man’s Creek in Iowa City and the “Dead Tree Area,” a wildlife
pre serve in Amana, Iowa. The chronology of Mendieta’s life
and career on the following pages further underscores the
importance of the artist’s working sites and how after 1978
she made use of a greater variety of natural locations. As an
artist who did not have a conventional studio in which to
work for most of her career, she relied heavily on opportunities
to travel to rural environments where she could execute her
actions and experiments in nature. After her relocation to
New York City in January of 1978, Mendieta made works in
upstate New York, New Mexico, Indiana, Massachusetts,
Canada, Cuba, and Colombia. She accepted a variety of visit -
ing artist opportu nities and teaching and exhibition engage-
ments each year that afforded her work sites outside New
York City, and in fall 1983 she moved to Rome to take up a
resdency at the American Academy. There Mendieta radically
shifted her practice, creating studio-based work, including
a series of sculptures and numerous drawings, in an effort to
make more permanent kinds of art. She also prepared project
proposals, a selection of which are reproduced for the first
time in the final chapter of this book.
It is important to reiterate that the unseen works pre-
sented here were not chosen by the artist, but by an individual
curator, myself. The choice, however, is informed by more
than five years of extensive research, intimate knowledge of the
artist’s archive, and approximately one hundred interviews
with Mendieta’s family, artist-peers, curators, and friends. My
aim is simply to reveal the raw originality of one of the most
inventive and iconoclastic artists of the late twentieth century.
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1948 Ana Maria Mendieta is born November 18 in Havana,
Cuba.10
1959 President Fulgencio Batista flees Cuba for the United
States as revolutionary Cuban leader Fidel Castro and his
followers march triumphantly into Havana on January 8.
1960 Castro begins to nationalize U.S.-owned oil refineries,
sugar mills, and utilities.
1961 Castro declares his government “socialist” and later
“Marxist-Leninist.” U.S. breaks diplomatic relations with Cuba
in January and a mass exodus of 215,000 Cubans begins.
Ana’s father Ignacio, an early Castro supporter, engages in
counterrevolutionary activities when asked to renounce his
Catholic faith and join the Communist party. Ignacio discov-
ers Ana, age 12, and Raquelín, age 15, also participating
in clandestine efforts. Fearing for their safety, he sends his
daughters to the U.S. on September 11 as part of Oper ation
Pedro Pan, a program facilitated by the Catholic Diocese of
Miami that granted visa waivers to unaccom pa nied Cuban
minors seeking political asylum in the U.S. Three weeks after
their arrival in Miami, Ana and Raquelín are placed in a
group home in Dubuque, Iowa, until foster care is arranged.
1962 President John F. Kennedy declares an embargo on trade
with Cuba that remains in place to this day. Ana resides in
three foster homes and one boarding school until her living
situation stabilizes.
1965 Ana’s father Ignacio is arrested in January for allegedly
collabo rating with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency prior
to the Cuban Missile Crisis. He is sentenced to twenty years’
im prisonment in Cuba. Ana graduates from Regis High
School and enrolls in Briar Cliff College, Sioux City, Iowa.
1966 On January 29 Ana’s mother Raquel and younger
brother Ignacio leave Cuba on a Freedom Flight. They settle
in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, near Ana and Raquelín, whose father
remains in prison.
1967 Mendieta transfers to the University of Iowa, Iowa
City, and studies the art of primitive and indigenous cultures
during the fall semester.
1969 Mendieta begins graduate studies in painting at the
University of Iowa and meets artist Hans Breder, a professor
of art at the University with whom she develops a profes sion -
al and romantic partnership that lasts through the summer
of 1980.
14
CHRONOLOGY
Ana Mendieta at the Calixtlahuaca Archaeological
Zone, outside Mexico City, 1971
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15
Mexico City
Mexico
City of Oaxaca
Puebla
Chiapas
Veracruz
Gulf of Tehuantepec
Salina CruzLa Ventosa
Pacific Ocean
Zaachila
San Felipe
El Tule
Dainzú
Teotitlan del Valle
Yagul Mitla
Tlacolula
Cuilapán de Guerrero
Monte Alban
Guerrero
Oaxaca
Pacific Ocean
United States of America
Gulf of Mexico
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16
1970 Breder establishes the Intermedia Program as a formal
degree program at the University of Iowa and co-founds the
Center for New Performing Arts (CNPA) there. Mendieta
models for Breder and participates in Robert Wilson’s
CNPA workshops in body movement. She performs in
Wilson’s productions of Deafman Glance and Handbill at
the University.
1971 Mendieta travels to Mexico for the first time and does
field research in archaeology as summer coursework for the
University of Iowa.
1972 Mendieta completes her first MFA, in painting, but gives
up painting to concentrate on mixed media and performance.
She makes Grass on Woman (page 77), her first earth-body
work, in which she lies face down on a green lawn and appears
to fuse into the natural landscape. She presents Death of a
Chicken (pages 43–45), her first perfor mance-based work, at
the Intermedia studio, holding the flailing carcass of a de -
capitated chicken as the blood splatters across her body.
1973 Using blood increasingly in her work, Mendieta creates
pieces about violence against women, a series precipitated
by the rape and murder of a University of Iowa student, Sarah
Ann Otten. Mendieta travels to Mexico in the summer with
Breder and a group of his Intermedia students and executes
her first Siluetas in the archaeological zone of Yagul, 20 miles
outside Oaxaca.
1974 Returning to Mexico with Breder, Mendieta makes
Siluetas at Yagul and the church complex at Cuilapán de Guer-
rero, also outside Oaxaca. Traveling with Breder’s students to
the fishing village of La Ventosa in Salina Cruz, she films Bird
Run and Ocean Bird Washup (pages 96–97).
1975 After creating Siluetas at Old Man’s Creek, Mendieta
returns with Breder to Oaxaca and La Ventosa in the summer.
She begins to work with fire in the fall with the assistance of
University of Iowa professor Julius Schmidt, who advises her
about pyrotechnics.
1976 Mendieta travels with Breder to Europe and performs
Blood and Feathers (pages 19–20) there in the spring. In the
summer she returns to Mexico with Breder and creates a
number of Siluetas using natural materials found at La Ven-
tosa. She commissions a local fireworks maker in Oaxaca to
execute her silhouette with fireworks, which are ignited one
evening as the sun sets (page 152). In Iowa in the fall, she
initiates the Tree of Life series.
1977 At the beginning of the year, Mendieta creates several
Siluetas in snow and ice. Increasingly fascinated by goddess
imagery and funerary themes, she commences the Fetish and
Ixchell series at Old Man’s Creek, and in the summer also
creates Tumbas (tombs) there (pages 130–35). She con tinues
to experiment with pyrotechnics, burning figures into the
ground, tree trunks, and grass. At the end of the year, she
again works in ice and snow.
1978 Mendieta relocates to New York City in the hope of
developing her career as an artist. She does a public perform-
ance of Body Tracks at Franklin Furnace and attempts to create
Siluetas within a museum by making a natural tableau, using
grasses, branches, and plant material, at the College of Old
Westbury. She makes Siluetas in the upstate New York land-
scape, and in summer travels to Iowa and makes Siluetas using
natural materials, algae, and fertilizer, as well as volcanic
mounds fired with gunpowder.
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17
1979 Mendieta is reunited with her father Ignacio after eight -
een years of separation and begins to pursue opportunities to
travel to Cuba through various cultural organizations in New
York. She returns to Iowa in the summer and creates variations
on the Volcano and Tree of Life series. She teaches at the
College of Old Westbury, New York, in the fall as an adjunct
professor and makes works in upstate New York. She becomes
a member of the women's gallery A.I.R. On November 12,
during her first solo exhibition there, she meets American
minimalist sculptor Carl Andre.
1980 In January Mendieta returns to Cuba, traveling under
the auspices of the Círculo de Cultura Cubana, an organiza-
tion founded by Cuban exiles to promote cultural exchange
and relations between Cuba and the U.S. In the spring semes-
ter she teaches at the College of Old Westbury, New York.
In April she creates several outdoor works as a visiting artist at
Kean College, New Jersey. She creates a gunpowder piece in
the Harlem Meer in Central Park for the group exhibition
Art Across the Park. In the summer she returns to Oaxaca and
La Ventosa with Breder, films gunpowder works at San Felipe,
and carves figures into earthen embankments. Her ro man tic
involvement with Breder ends after the trip, and her relation-
ship with Andre deepens.
1981 Mendieta is a visiting artist at the School of the Art Insti-
tute of Chicago. She makes gunpowder works in the sand
dunes on the border between Indiana and Illinois. In March
she creates a Silueta in a Georgetown cemetery for the Wash-
ington Project for the Arts (page 111) and in May she makes
one at La Cuarta Bienal de Medellín, Colombia. Returning to
Cuba in January and July, she makes carved and painted works
Ciudad deLa Habana
La Habana
Jaruco
Varadero
Pinar del Río
Isla de laJuventud
Cardenas
The Bahamas
Cayman Islands
Jamaica
MatanzasVillaClara
CienfuegosSancti Spíritus
Ciego deÁvila
Camagüey Las Tunas
Granma
Santiagode Cuba
Holguín
Guantánamo
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18
in limestone rock in Varadero and Jaruco, respectively. In Sep -
tember she is a visiting artist at Alfred State University, New
York, and makes a goddess figure outdoors at a nearby hill site.
In the fall she travels to Miami and creates Ceiba Fetish (pages
288–89) and Ochún as a guest of the Frances Wolfson Gallery,
Miami-Dade Community College. She begins to make draw-
ings in her apartment in New York.
1982 As a guest of Real Artways and the Hartford Art School,
Mendieta makes Arbitra, a female witness figure carved and
burned into a seven-foot-tall tree trunk (pages 285–87).
She works in a Fogels ville, Pennsylvania, rock quarry through
the assistance of businessman Arthur Rodale. In Scarborough,
Ontario, outside Toronto, she carves Labyrinth of Venus into
the rocky side of a cliff overlooking Lake Ontario. She
begins to make leaf drawings and commences a book project
in the fall to document the Rupestrian sculptures made in
Cuba at Jaruco National Park. In October she creates four
inde pendent sculptures of moss, plants, and stone for a solo
exhibition at the Lowe Art Museum, Miami Beach. She
exhibits out door mud coil sculptures at the University of
New Mexico, Albuquerque, as a guest of the University Art
Museum.
1983 Mendieta creates outdoor spiral figures in sand on Cape
Cod and Long Island beaches. She makes a series of sand and
stone works in Miami, and spends time in the summer with
her parents in Iowa, where she makes a series of mud coil
works near Old Man’s Creek, Sharon Center. She is awarded
the Rome Prize, which gives her a one-year studio residency
at the American Academy in Rome, which begins in October
1984. Mendieta creates a series of low-relief floor sculptures
made of sand and earth mixed with binder, which she ex hib -
its at Galleria Primo Piano in Rome. As a visiting artist at the
Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Providence, she
creates Furrows (page 283), an undulating outdoor earth work
on the lawn of the RISD Museum of Art. She works with
an Italian craftsman outside Rome to create freestanding
totemic sculptures of burned and carved wood. Extending her
stay in Rome beyond her residency, she rents a studio and
apartment on the Academy grounds. She travels exten sively
in Europe with Carl Andre and visits Cerveteri, Pompeii, and
Hadrian’s Villa, in Italy, and prehistoric sites in Malta
and at Newgrange, Ireland, which serve as potent inspiration
for the development of large-scale artworks. She participates
in Land Marks: New Site Proposals by Twenty-two Original
Pioneers of Environmental Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-
Hudson, New York, with Alice Aycock, Nancy Holt, Mary
Miss, and Robert Stackhouse; she pro poses La Maja de Yerba
(pages 292–93).
1985 Mendieta marries Carl Andre on January 17 in a private
ceremony in Rome. She develops a commission for the Mac -
Arthur Park Public Art Program for the Otis Art Institute
of Parsons School of Design, Los Angeles, that includes seven
outdoor totemic sculptures titled La Jungla. She returns to
New York City in August. On Sep tember 8 she falls to her
death from a window of the thirty-fourth-floor apartment
on Mercer Street that she shared with Andre.
1989 The first retrospective exhibition of Mendieta’s work
opens in November at the New Museum of Contemporary
Art, New York, and travels to LACE, Los Angeles, and the
Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, through 1990.
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19
1993 Members of the Women’s Action Coalition protest the
absence of women artists in the opening show of the Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum’s new SoHo branch (now closed)
with signs that read, “Where Is Ana Mendieta?”
1996 A retrospective organized by the Centro Galego de Arte
Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, opens and
travels to the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany, and the Fun-
dació Tápies, Barcelona, through 1997.
2004 A retrospective organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, opens in June at
the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and travels
to the Hirshhorn Museum, the Des Moines Art Center, and
the Miami Art Museum through early 2006.
Blood and Feathers, No. 2, 1974 (Old Man's Creek,
Sharon Center, Iowa). Still from Super 8 color silent film
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INTERMEDIA
In the early 1970s, Ana Mendieta experimented with aspects of
performance art before evolving the concept of “earth-body
works” and the signature Silueta series in which she integrated
her body (or its impression) with the land. As a student at
the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Mendieta was introduced
to conceptual art and experimental new media such as video.
In 1971, before completing a degree in painting, she made a
decisive move away from conventional easel painting to per-
formance. This shift was fueled by her deepening engagement
with the University’s new Intermedia program and its recently
opened Center for New Performing Arts, both founded in the
late 1960s by the German-born artist Hans Breder, a pro fes -
sor at the University who would become Mendieta’s mentor
and lover throughout the 1970s.
Breder’s Intermedia program fostered cross-disciplinary
collaboration among students, faculty, visiting artists, and
schol ars in a workshop setting modeled on the University’s ac -
claimed Writer’s Workshop. In the 1970s the Intermedia pro -
gram was one of the most progressive university-based arts
pro grams of its kind in the country. Breder introduced Mendi-
eta and other notable students, including Charles Ray and
Sandy Skoglund, to new forms of body art (later called per-
formance art), Viennese Actionism, and kinetic, street, air, and
land art. Between 1968 and 1978, Breder brought an impres-
sive array of visiting artists and critics to Iowa City, including
Robert Wilson, Vito Acconci, Willoughby Sharp, Ted Victoria,
Scott Burton, Mary Beth Edelson, and Lucy Lippard. Many
were invited to create performances at the University’s Center
21
Documentation of an untitled work, 1972 (Intermedia
studio, University of Iowa). 35 mm color slide
Opposite: Documentation of Blood and Feathers, 1974 (Old Man’s Creek, Sharon Center, Iowa). Lifetime color photograph
from 35 mm color slide, 10 x 8 in. Collection Raquelín Mendieta Family Trust
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22
for New Performing Arts. Between 1969 and 1971, Mendieta
modeled for Breder, observed the activities of the Intermedia
workshop, and sometimes performed for workshop partici-
pants. She studied body movement with the theatrical director
Robert Wilson and in 1971 appeared in two of Wilson’s pro-
ductions. In 1972 Mendieta enrolled in the Intermedia program
and began to document her own private actions in 35 mm
slides and Super 8 films (each reel was approximately three
minutes long). Breder urged his students to develop a three-step
working pro cess: concept development, execution, and docu-
mentation. Mendieta followed this approach methodically
through out her career.
In Mendieta’s experimental works made between 1972
and 1974, she sculpts her hair with shampoo, reshapes her
phys iognomy with makeup and wigs, isolates or frames facial
features through a hole in a door, projects anatomical slides
onto her body, appears to sweat blood, secretes milk from a
breast, and paints and writes with blood on the wall of the
Intermedia studio. These experiments reveal her familiarity
with the works of pioneering performance artists Vito Acconci,
Bruce Nauman, Yves Klein, Chris Burden, Dennis Oppen-
heim, and the Viennese Actionists, as well as Breder’s own
performance-based works using mirrors and live models, which
he posed in the landscape. In Mirage, 1974 (pages 74–75), an
action unusual in being docu mented solely on Super 8 film.
Mendieta is seen in a mirror sitting naked in the grass and
gazing at her reflection before cutting through a prosthetic
belly filled with white feathers.
While most of these actions were executed privately,
Mendieta performed several live actions in the Intermedia
workshop before an audience of students and faculty. Fascinat-
ed by Marcel Duchamp’s notorious gender transformations,
she partnered twice with Iowa writer Morty Sklar to create
performances in which she methodically transferred the hair
from Sklar’s beard to her face. She executed a similar solo per -
formance, not previously published, using flowers that she
fanned in front of her face (pages 30–31). To create Feathers on
Woman, 1972, Mendieta worked with a fellow student, onto
whose body she glued white feathers; this “feather woman”
appeared in one of Breder’s productions at the Center for New
Performing Arts. While photographs of her (including three
black-and-white photos printed by Mendieta) are well-known,
the un published slides reproduced here (pages 34–41) reveal
additional views of the striking feathered figure. Some per-
formances, including the well-known Body Tracks, Blood and
Feathers, and Death of a Chicken, were executed on several
occasions and in different locations. The artist’s slide and film
archive reveal additional views of these events as well as pre -
viously unknown experiments using blood, including Blood
Sign #1 (pages 71–73) and Bloodwriting (pages 66–69).
Documentation of Facial
Cosmetic Variations, 1972
(Iowa). 4 of 9 35 mm color
slides
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23
As Mendieta continued to evolve her practice through-
out the early 1970s, she moved from live performance to
creating sculptural tableaux. These works suggested an absent
body’s presence and would often engage passersby as un -
witting participants. In People Looking at Blood, Moffitt, 1973
(pages 47–53), Mendieta created a mock scene of violence near
her apartment in Iowa City, with blood that seemed to seep
out from under a door and bloody animal parts on the side-
walk. She surreptitiously photographed the various reactions of
passersby, from obliviousness to dismay. The piece concludes
when a workman appears four slides from the end, observes
the mess, and dutifully proceeds to remove it. Mendieta shot
an entire roll of film to document the action; the full slide
sequence is published here for the first time. A handful of un -
seen images re lated to the artist’s well-known Rape Scene (also
described by the artist as Rape Tableau), 1973, also survive
in the artist’s archive. For this action, inspired by a brutal rape
murder on the University of Iowa campus, Mendieta invited
Intermedia work shop participants to visit her apartment at a
prearranged time. As faculty and students arrived, they discov-
ered her apart ment door ajar. Inside the artist was posed silently,
doubled over a table in a pool of blood with implements of
violence scattered about (pages 55–59).
The archive contains documentation of related actions,
in which she left suitcases sullied with bloody animal parts
on campus or posed half-naked in the brush to suggest a rape
in Rape Performance, 1973. It is likely that most of those who
encountered Mendieta’s tableaux around campus were un -
aware that they were works of art, and the discovery could be
quite unsettling. Bloody Mattresses, 1973 (pages 60–61), was
reported by an Intermedia student to his class. He described
the horrific scene he found in an abandoned farmhouse near
campus only to learn that he had stumbled upon Mendieta’s
latest tableau. The artist’s intent in creating these temporary
art works outside the traditional gallery or museum was to
incite public re action and conversation about violence, which,
she felt, was often sublimated in our society.
Examining Mendieta’s known and unknown perfor -
mances, actions, and tableaux allows us a deeper understanding
of her development and working methods as an artist. We see
her experiment with different kinds of performative practices
and are able to track key decisions in which she chooses to em -
brace or discard particular conventions of performance. During
these critical formative years, Mendieta defines a more distanced
relationship to her audience and underscores the im port ance
of the document—whether short films or still photo graphs—
as a medium for witnessing her art.
Documentation of Rape Performance,
1973 (Iowa). 35 mm color slide
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UNVERKÄUFLICHE LESEPROBE
Olga Viso
Unseen Mendieta
Gebundenes Buch, Pappband, 304 Seiten, 24,0x30,0320 farbige Abbildungen, 30 s/w AbbildungenISBN: 978-3-7913-3966-5
Prestel
Erscheinungstermin: August 2008
Unseen Mendieta zeigt eine umfangreiche Auswahl bisher unveröffentlichter Werke derfrüh verstorbenen Perfomance-Künstlerin Ana Mendieta. Sie wurde in den 70er Jahren vorallem durch ihre Silueta-Serie berühmt – Arbeiten, bei denen sie mit ihrem eigenen Körperoder dessen Silhouette eine vergängliche Synthese mit der Natur zelebrierte. UmfassendeFotostrecken und begleitende Essays dokumentieren sowohl die Entstehungsprozesse ihrerWerke als auch deren schöpferische und spirituelle Spannweite im Kontext ihrer Zeit.
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