Ana Mendieta

Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants) - 1972

Ana Mendieta (1948 – 1985) was a well-rounded Cuban artist who used a variety of mediums which included painting, sculpting, video and performance. She is most well-known for her theatrical performances and displays that combined the themes of ethnicity, gender, nature and death in ways that were never before explored. Mendieta was a Cuban exile forced to flee her home country at 12 years old to escape Fidel Castro’s threatening rise to power. From Cuba, she was transported to Iowa where she begun to explore her relationship with her Afro-Caribbean roots after being fully brought up and socialized by Midwestern American culture. Under the teachings of Hans Breder, she obtained her MFA in Intermedia Studies and focused almost solely on the performance art she is recognized for.

Tree of Life - 1976

Silueta Series - 1973 - 1980

Undeniably Mendieta’s most famous work, Silueta Series (1973 – 1980), fits wonderfully within one of the main aspects of 1970s feminism which sought the reclamation of the depiction of female bodies. Of this particular series, Chadwick explains, “Her [Mendieta’s] work made powerful identifications between the female body and the land in ways that annihilated the conventions of surface on which the traditions of Western art rest” (374). In what she deemed “earth-body work,” she made direct connections between Afro-Caribbean notions of Mother Nature and the naturalness of the female body, of which traditional Western art and culture considered vulgar and private. In a truly defiant technique, Mendieta used her own naked body to form many of the outlines for Silueta for a clear silhouette of the female form within the earth. During its creation, as well as now, the series has been criticized by males and feminists alike for its supposed sexualization of the female body, which feminists were fighting to wipe out. A critic of Mendieta’s work echoes this concern: “Mendieta’s essentialism can be characterized as a reliance upon an ahistorical idea, mother earth, to generate the Silueta Series. Thus the traditional link between the female body and nature is supported and a received idea about sexual difference is retained” (Susan Best, 57). Conservative males preyed off of these disagreements within the feminist community to demonstrate how dangerous a female in control of her own body can be.

Venus Negra

Venus Negra, a work within the Silueta Series, depicts the legendary Cuban goddess of the same name. Chadwick explains, “women…used the imagery of the Goddess and goddess-worshipping religions as an affirmation of female power, the female body, the female will and women’s connections and heritage (371). Stories of powerful historical and mythical women were ushered into a culture that desperately needed to balance out its extensive collection of stories of heroic men. The importance of the powerful female legend within the feminist movement is exemplified by Mendieta’s article within feminist magazine Heresies, which included a photograph of her performance and an English translation of the myth (Jane Blocker, 33). Probably the most important contribution of Mendieta’s work was the dissemination of knowledge of female power and the female plight to those outside of the esoteric art world.

Untitled (Rape Scene) - 1973

Sweating Blood - 1973

Outside of Silueta, Mendieta commonly used blood in her most dramatic performances. In one of her most controversial works, Untitled (Rape Scene), her bloodied and half-naked body was tied to a table and put on display for her invitees. This performance is an example of a work that is not art just simply for art’s sake, but a statement dealing with real-life situations that objectify and degrade women and their bodies. About this work, Cabañas poignantly states, “She used it to emphasize the societal conditions by which the female body is colonized as the object of male desire and ravaged under masculine aggression…The audience was forced to reflect on its responsibility; its empathy was elicited and translated to the space of awareness in which sexual violence could be addressed” (12). The use of blood is also present in Untitled (Self-Portrait with Blood), Untitled (Death of a Chicken) and Body Tracks and has been understood to be connected with her exploration of Santería, a traditional religion of the Caribbean. Her bloody performances like Sweating Blood are said to resemble practices that derive from the religion.

Untitled (Body Tracks) - 1982

Although most of her work was ephemeral, its influence lives on. Eleanor Heartney finds Mendieta’s influence in the work of contemporary artists Janine Antoni and Tania Bruguera in the ways in which they use their bodies to make statements about the female condition (139). The cause of Ana Mendieta’s early death is still contested today, but her death ironically symbolized the themes of degradation and devaluation of female life that she and her contemporaries tackled in their works. Mendieta’s use of a wide array of mediums and materials (blood, animals, earth, etc.) expanded the meaning of performance art and brought women to exhibit their work outside of discriminatory museums. Cabañas says of Mendieta’s legacy, “She positioned herself, a female and ethnic Other, as a subject and recognized the contingency between the individual body and the social body; her art takes us across the borders of individual and social, self and Other, subject and object” (16).

Works Cited

Best, Susan. "The Serial Spaces of Ana Mendieta." Art History 30.1 (2007): 57-82.

Blocker, Jane. "Ana Mendieta and the Politics of the Venus Negra." Cultural studies 12.1 (1998): 31-50.

Cabañas, Kaira M. "Ana Mendieta:" Pain of Cuba, Body I Am"." Woman's Art Journal (1999): 12-17.

Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. 5th ed. New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 1990. Print.

Heartney, Eleanor. "Rediscovering Ana Mendieta." Art in America 92.10 (2004): 138-143.