Spotlight on Ana Mendieta: Celebrating female artists

Women’s place within the art world has been – and is often thought to still be – marginal. Institutional obstacles prevent female success, male artists dominate top galleries and the art history behind these spaces consists of a very Eurocentric, very male perspectives. Pushing the fight against this historical absenting of women from the art world is just one of the legacies trailblazing women artists may leave us.

Mendieta’s work has grown in recognition, correlating with feminist movements (such as her own) that helped to turn the tides of the male-dominated art world

For Ana Mendieta, her death in 1985 spawned the protest movement known as ‘WHERE IS ANA MENDIETA?’. This protest collective, hoisting banners with the question of Mendieta’s absence – signalling to both exhibitions and the suspicious circumstances of her death – denounced the institutional erasure of women. Pointing specifically to the artistic stature minimalist sculptor Carl Andres continued to reach, despite his facing trial for Mendieta’s murder, the moral integrity of the art world came under fire. Why, they asked, is Andres’ work paraded while Mendieta’s is distinctly absent?

With International Women’s Day taking place this March, now marks a perfect time to celebrate the influence and legacies of Ana Mendieta’s artistry. Since her passing, Mendieta’s work has grown in recognition, correlating with feminist movements (such as her own) that helped to turn the tides of the male-dominated art world. Mendieta’s art continues to hold an undeniable energy and vitality today. It is easy to call a work of art ‘timeless,’ but Mendieta’s pieces truly deserve that label; they navigate the forces of time, space and history with daring and curiosity.

By making herself and her body the subject of her work, representing and distorting it within her own terms, Mendieta dismissed the insidious presence of the male gaze within art history

Alongside her contemporaries and friends such as Carolee Schneeman and Vito Acconci, Mendieta became a pioneer of interdisciplinary, performance and body art during the 1970s. First studying painting at the University of Iowa, Mendieta became dissatisfied with the medium, pivoting towards more bodily, elemental and energetic ways of producing art. During the 1970s and 1980s, there was a real political energy that came alongside the rise of body and performance art. Shifting away from the male-led movement of Abstract Expressionism during second-wave feminism, Mendieta cemented her name-in-lights for progressing the ways in which people understood and imagined the body within art. Her use of the body (particularly the female form) as a material in and of itself was a powerful and fairly new mode of expression.

In 1972, Mendieta created the works Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints) and Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants). Whether distorting her own face by viciously pushing it against transparent glass, or blurring gendered assumptions by gluing a man’s facial hair across her jaw, both of these pieces see Mendieta transforming the female form. By making herself and her body the subject of her work, representing and distorting it within her own terms, Mendieta dismissed the insidious presence of the male gaze within art history. Her body was made a subject on her own terms. Its power, limitations and fluidity were her own to express and examine.

Mendieta’s position as a Cuban-American woman artist put her at the margins of the art world. Mendieta described herself as being in an ‘in between’ kind of state. She had grown up in Cuba and left as a young teen for American through Operation Peter Pan, which saw over 14,000 children brought into the country and out of the doctrine of Fidel Castro. This movement away from her homeland to take root in the U.S. gave Mendieta a personal sense of otherness and lack of belonging. Dissatisfied with the marginalisation of women of colour in the 1970s art world, Mendieta held an exhibition in 1980 called ‘Dialectics of Isolation’ in order to showcase the talent of Third World women artists who had been ‘othered’ within the institution.

If any message from Mendieta’s oeuvre can speak to us the most today, perhaps it is this: the power of the body and its universal connection and collaboration with the earth

Existing between cultures, Mendieta’s art manages to take the discursive perspective of an ‘outsider.’ Just as Mendieta blurred gendered boundaries in her work and transformed the body in radical ways, her work also crossed thresholds and transcended geographical borders altogether. In what is perhaps her most famous series, titled Siluetas (1973-1978), Mendieta sought out natural landscapes as spiritual and energetic sites for humans to ground themselves within. The series, recorded on film and in photographs, depicts Mendieta’s body as an imprint in different natural environments. Her body appears almost like a ghostly hollow, shadow or erosion within the spaces. Despite her invisibility, one can sense the presence of Mendieta in the Siluetas as something highly palpable – a powerful imprinting of her presence and ‘othered’ body within nature. In this way, the series dismantles individual identity, borders and geography to find a universal rooting to the earth. The Siluetas act as spiritual meditations on corporeality and the human’s place within earthly cycles. We are at once bound to ephemerality and death, while blossoming with life. If any message from Mendieta’s oeuvre can speak to us the most today, perhaps it is this: the power of the body and its universal connection and collaboration with the earth.