Week 7 - Ana Mendieta

The artist that I chose to focus on is Ana Mendieta. She is a Cuban-American sculptor, painter, photographer and performance artist. Mendieta was born in 1948 in Havana, Cuba and was sent to the US in her adolescence as a refugee. Much of her work stems from her experiences of that displacement. Her experiences as an adolescent and young adult informed her political ideals that bled into her work, usually quite literally. Early on in her career she began experimenting with her own body and blood as mediums for her art and began incorporating aspects of live ritual from religions like Santeria into her work. During her time in college, she focused on themes including feminism, domestic violence, death, and identity.
One of the series that I will be focusing on for my presentation is her Siluetas Series, which totaled about 200 different photographs over the span of roughly seven years (1973-1980). In this series, she centers her work on the body; specifically the use of simplified body silhouettes. Mendieta combines the body with land, often installing her work directly into her environment. Each piece consisted of Mendieta either physically laying on the ground and merging with the surrounding elements such as leaves and twigs, or using her body to make an imprint in the ground and then photographing the ensuing outline absent of her form. Much her work in this time was used to create a dialogue between the landscape and the female body and allow her to her to reconnect with nature and feel rooted in place to the land. This series was a way for Mendieta to gain some closure from the trauma of experiencing her formative years in a place that was not her home.