Ana Mendieta’s world: the ultimate guide to the Cuban-American artist’s influences and inspirations

Prolific across a wide range of media, Ana Mendieta is known for her groundbreaking explorations of feminine archetypes and the natural world. Through performative action, photography, film and more, Mendieta pushed the boundaries of artistic expression and created a body of work that still captivates and inspires. Though her life was cut short at the age of 36, she made an indelible impact on contemporary art, and her work continues to be revisited and celebrated across the globe.

Where did Mendieta draw inspiration from?

Cuba

Mendieta was born in Havana in 1948. At the age of 12 she was sent to the United States through Operation Pedro Pan, a US government initiative that brought unaccompanied children into the country to escape Cuba’s communist regime. Mendieta was sent to an orphanage in Iowa alongside her sister, Raquelín.

In much of her work, Mendieta considered the ideas of displacement and exile in relation to her Cuban heritage. Cuba figures prominently in her oeuvre, as both a symbol of loss and a source of inspiration.

Later in life, Mendieta made at least seven trips back to her homeland. While in Cuba, she produced a body of work that includes the Esculturas Rupestres (Rupestrian Sculptures) series. For these site-specific pieces, documented in photographs and Super 8 film, Mendieta carved her iconic forms into the limestone walls of the ancient caves in Jaruco Park. Several of the works were later named after mythological goddesses from the indigenous Taíno communities.

In 1980, the art critic Gerardo Mosquera wrote the introduction for Mendieta’s solo exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery in New York saying, “What she did there no longer represented a return to earth. It was something more: a return to her homeland.’’ This idea of homecoming is one that she would explore throughout her life.

Iowa

After arriving in Iowa through Operation Pedro Pan, Mendieta bounced between orphanages and foster homes. In high school, she found solace in art, and went on to earn a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in painting, as well as a master’s of fine arts at the University of Iowa.

While pursuing her MA, Mendieta studied under the German artist Hans Breder, who was an important influence on her work. Breder spearheaded the innovative Intermedia Program at Iowa and encouraged his students to experiment with cross-disciplinary methods. Many of Mendieta’s core pursuits were born during this period, like her dialogue with nature and unique melding of media. She would continue to build her practice across film, photography and more over the coming years.

Mexico

In 1971, Mendieta made her first trip to Mexico. While there, she became engrossed in pre-Hispanic rituals and iconography, and described her travels to the country as ‘like going back to the source, being able to get some magic just by being there’. It was in Mexico that Mendieta conceived of her most famous and enduring series, Siluetas (1973-1980), in which the female form is imprinted into the landscape. She would return many more times in later years.

New York

Mendieta moved to Manhattan in 1978 and immediately immersed herself in the city’s artistic community. She joined Artists in Residence (A.I.R.) Gallery, a not-for-profit artist-run space for women artists, where she both exhibited and curated. New York would remain her primary residence for the rest of her life.

Rome

In 1983, Mendieta won the Prix de Rome and travelled to Italy’s capital for a residency through the American Academy in Rome. She became enamoured with the Italian city, and felt a connection to the culture that reminded her of Cuba. While there, she continued her exploration of studio-based sculpture. Working in the studio shifted her artistic practice, and she turned her focus towards objects of permanence — drawings, prints, sculpture and more — while incorporating the same natural materials and themes of her earlier series. Mendieta continued to travel between Rome and New York until her death.

What themes run throughout Mendieta's oeuvre?

Religious customs

Mendieta was raised Catholic and much of her visual vocabulary is informed by religious iconography. She was influenced in particular by the spiritual practice of Santeriá, an Afro-Cuban religion that blends elements from both the Yoruba people and the Roman Catholic Church. Mendieta often evoked spiritual rituals through the materials she employed — such as blood and water — as well as the images and devotional motifs included in her work.

The natural world

A central touchstone of Mendieta’s artistic practice is our relationship to the earth. She drew from the natural world in a physical and abstract sense, mining the landscape for material while considering questions of ecology and our place within the universe.

In 1973, Mendieta embarked on the first of her Siluetas, a series that would come to define her. These site-specific ‘earth-body’ works feature silhouettes of the female form embedded into the landscape. Mendieta often used her own body to create her Siluetas, covering herself in materials like wild flowers or mud, thereby merging her form with nature.

Mendieta was a pioneer of what came to be known as Earth Art. Unlike other artists of this movement, she did not seek to alter the topography of a site but rather to fuse with it. Through her creations, she interrogates the unrelenting cycles of life and death and the unyielding power of nature.

The female body

It’s impossible to talk about Mendieta without noting her pioneering use of her own body and representations of the female form across media. Her provocative works centred important topics within feminism, including violence against women and the objectification of the female figure. In her trailblazing Siluetas series, the artist becomes one with the landscape, redefining the nude as a powerful force of nature and harkening back to ancient symbols of womanhood like the Venus of Willendorf.

This inclusion of the female form was also a means of questioning and commenting on the role of women in society. Her multimedia invocation of the body — whether imprinted into the landscape or the lifeforce of nature — is a visionary and enduring example of feminist expression.

Which media did Mendieta use?

Performative action

Incorporating her own body is at the heart of much of Mendieta’s earliest works, and she wove a sense of theatricality across various media. One of her first forays into what she called “tableaux’’ was the visceral piece Rape Scene (1973), a work made in response to the rape and murder of fellow student Sarah Ann Ottens at the University of Iowa. Staged in her apartment, she created her own version of the assault. The tableaux confronts the audience with violence, demanding a reaction. These elements of the piece — using her body as a vehicle of expression and compelling a response from the viewer — would be continuing preoccupations for the artist.

Photography

Mendieta used photography throughout her career as a permanent record of her temporary, site-specific works. Many of her groundbreaking conceptual pieces survive only in photographs and film, which the artist employed as a cornerstone of her practice. She embraced the interdisciplinary opportunity of performative acts, and was driven to consider the various ways in which a single moment could be depicted to the viewer. She used photography to comprehensively document her actions, sometimes selecting a single image as the final representation, and other times choosing multiple. In these images, the paradox at the heart of Mendieta’s oeuvre is laid bare: the ephemerality of nature preserved for all of time.

Film

Mendieta was a prolific filmmaker, creating more than 100 moving image works throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Through the deliberate and conscientious recording of her works, Mendieta’s films are both documentation of a moment and intentional works of art. As with photography, she employed multiple mediums in order to present several different perspectives to an audience. With film, she captured the passage of time, allowing further meditation on the cyclical rhythms of nature and transience of life that fascinated her.

Now housed in major museum collections such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York as well as the Tate in London, these works cement Mendieta as a pioneer of the practice.

Drawing

Like her performative actions, photography and films, Mendieta used drawing to connect with the natural world. Some of her works on paper incorporate found materials like leaves, sand and dirt. In using these organic substances, she embraces the ephemerality of nature through the changing composition of the material over time.

Sculpture

As her practice evolved, Mendieta moved away from site-specific actions centred on her body and into more free-standing works. These ranged from monumental sculptures carved from wood to her Sandwoman Series, in which the artist built sculptures from sand collected from locations of significance.

While in Rome, Mendieta continued to experiment with studio-based sculpture. As with other media, she incorporated many of the same imagery and materials — anthropomorphic forms, found objects from nature and nods to primitive art.

Why has Mendieta’s work endured?

Though her life was brief, the powerful body of work that Mendieta left behind gains esteem with each passing year. Today, she is recognised as one of the most ambitious and thought-provoking artists of her era. Her works are represented in the collections of major museums across the globe, from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

In 2004, the Hirshhorn organised a traveling retrospective entitled Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance. The exhibition showcased the innovative and rich output of the artist and redefined her legacy in its reexamination of her oeuvre. Since then, she has been the posthumous recipient of the Cintas Foundation’s 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award, and was the subject of a belated obituary in the New York Times as part of their Overlooked No More series. Her work, which continues to be shown widely around the world, pushed the boundaries of experimental art in the 1970s and 1980s, and has had a lasting influence on generations of artists who have followed.