ANA MENDIETA

Her video works ‘Creek (1974)’ and ‘Untitled: Silueta Series (1978)’ will be on view from the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection and courtesy of Galerie LeLong & Co. In the ‘Silueta series (1973–1980)’, Mendieta staged performances where she laid down in natural landscapes or covered her body in organic materials and then documented the resulting imprints or silhouettes. The impression into the earth, the outline of her body suggests its absence. She marks the land, leaves traces of her body, of its existence. In many of the ‘Siluetas’, there is water or fire, the primordial elements of destruction or creation. Her silhouette in the video featured has been drawn in gunpowder, it looks like earth until it ignites, and her silhouette comes alive in sputtering flames, scorching the earth and perhaps levitating the memory of her body beyond its horizontal plane. 

In ‘Creek’ she floats Christ-like but face-down in a moving stream. Her body is visible, no longer an allusion, an impression, but she has positioned herself almost between life and death, in ritual union with the moving water that carries her body.

Born in Cuba, Mendieta moved to Iowa at age 12 with her sister as part of a US government asylum program for adolescents after the Cuban revolution. Mendieta eventually enrolled at the University of Iowa and, upon completing her undergraduate degree, began her graduate studies in art. After training as a painter, Mendieta quickly grew dissatisfied with the medium and transitioned to the university’s new MFA in Intermedia program, where she began to develop her interdisciplinary work. Throughout her career, Mendieta’s explorations of representation were grounded in an intersectional conception of identity where race, gender, age, and class operated simultaneously. “As non-white women, our struggles are two-fold,” Mendieta wrote in a curatorial statement for an exhibition of women artists of color. “This exhibition points not necessarily to the injustice or incapacity of a society that has not been willing to include us, but more towards a personal will to continue being ‘other’".

 “My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the Universe. It is a return to the maternal source.”

-Ana Mendieta