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Writer's pictureKate Lacivita

Ana Mendieta: Unite Me To The Universe

Updated: Feb 22

Cuban-American artist, performer and sculptor.

B. 1948 - d. 1985


Human outline in sand. At the legs is a blanket of red that moves to the left
Untitled, 1976. 33mm color photograph

Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) is an artist of creativity who beget works of glittering contemplation. The swirling connections of the physical body, intangible spirituality, and natural world mix with an acute awareness of violence done to these elements. Violence—especially to women's bodies—directly confronts the viewer, who cannot look away. Silueta is a series of Mendieta’s works that best showcase the most comprehensive exploration of violence done onto beautiful innocence. Abstract topographic formations, sometimes easily mistaken as purely natural circumstance, transform over time into that of the envisioned feminine goddess. To her, art was to a way in which to re-establish one’s place within the universe.


“My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe.” - Ana Mendieta

Ana Mendieta was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948 to a wealthy family of political influence. In 1961, at the age of 12, she was sent to school in the United States to flee the rising, tyrannical political power of Fidel Castro. Flourishing in the arts, she became interested in both creating and studying art. Eventually, she abstained her MFA from the University of Iowa where she was introduced to her love of avant-garde. Mendieta began to dabble in the art of ephemeral performance, recording and photographing the acts to reaffirm her connection to the world and to nature. 


In her first solo show at the AIR Gallery in New York in 1979, Silueta emphasizes the connection to the natural world, drawing influence from the emerging genres of land art, performance art, and body art. This series was photo documentation of works she created around the US, Cuba, and Mexico where the earth engulfed her own body, leaving a negative space where she once was. Absent of the physical form that once filled this cavity, the photographs show the emptiness that is left once the body has gone, or the empty space now occupied with new, natural life. For Mendieta, it may have referenced her own absence and loss of experience, being stripped of her life in Cuba at such a young age. 


This ritual of life and death is mimicked in Mendieta’s brilliant performances, recorded both on film as well as the photographs she took. The mixing of positive and negative space left by the body is what Mendieta was exploring in her works, as she stated, “I was trying to find my place in the earth and trying to define myself.” Lucy R. Lippard, in an introduction written by her for an illustrated novella titled Who is Ana Mendieta? describes the Silueta series as, “[U]nique even though her art could be seen as representing Everywoman. The Silueta series for which she is best known often featured blood, burial and death. Much has been made of their prescient resemblance to her own demise. She once told me that all her art was about Eros and life and death, and she did have premonitions of an early death.” 


Mendieta had a long interest in aboriginal rituals and traditions, which the Silueta series seems at its core to represent. The everlasting trauma of being exiled from Cuba at such a young age seems to have brought closer her Cuban roots and traditions. But Mendieta saw herself as “between” two cultures; two worlds. The lack of finality in her works is where this cultural purgatory lies. What she sets into the world is distorted, disrupted and disturbed. Mendieta can start the ritual of creating a space, but has no control thereafter. Her ritualistic usage of the body reflected, as Lippard states, “a process of self-discovery, self-affirmation, and the exorcism of pain.”


“She once told me that all her art was about Eros and life and death…” - Lucy R. Lippard

Mendieta’s untimely death in 1985 has not stopped others from seeking the same truths. By meditating with these truths, our existence and the connections to the earth help one seek what one's place is, or is not, within this earth. Does the violence placed upon the flesh of both flesh and dirt leave irreversible scars? Once done, what is left in the negative space? Ana Mendieta, through her series Silueta, demands these questions be not only known, but discussed.



Human figure outlined with many individual fireworks with arms raised
Anima, Silueta de Choetes (Fireworks Piece), 1976.


Further reading/Resources:





Kalb, Peter R. Art Since 1980: Charting the Contemporary. New Jersey: Pearson Education Inc, 2013. (Ana Mendieta can be found mentioned on pages 171-172)


Lippard, Lucy R. “Introduction.” In Who is Ana Mendieta? Authors Christine Redfern and Caro Caron, 1-25. New York: The Feminist Press, 2011.


Olga M. Viso. Ana Mendieta Earth Body: Sculpture and Performance, 1972-1985. Washington, DC: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2004.




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