Biography
Ana Mendieta® (b.1948, Havana, Cuba; d.1985, New York, US) was an interdisciplinary artist, who worked across sculpture, drawing, film, and photography. She is best known for her earth/body works, most specifically her now iconic Silueta Series, in which she used her body, and later the absence of the body to create images, or traces in landscape, as a way of connecting with nature and the universe.
‘For the images to have magic qualities,’ she once said, ‘I had to go to the source of life, to mother nature.’ Born in Havana, Mendieta was exiled to Iowa at the age of 12 and devoted her life and work to an exploration of displacement, identity, material mimesis, and the body as an articulation of nature and violence.
Spanning a period of 15 years, Mendieta created groundbreaking work across mediums, and created site-specific installations using organic materials such as earth, water and fire. Her pioneering work is in more than 120 public collections worldwide, and has been the subject of 56 monographic exhibitions, which includes 16 major museum retrospectives.
Works
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Untitled (Grass on Woman), 1972 -
Untitled (Chicken Piece), 1972 -
Sweating Blood, 1973 -
Untitled, 1973 -
Door Piece, 1973 -
Flower Person, Flower Body, 1975 -
Butterfly, 1975 -
Anima, Silueta de Cohetes (Firework Piece), 1976 -
Untitled: Silueta Series (Figure with Hay Burned), 1977 -
Silueta Series (Tree of Life Series), 1978 -
Untitled (Silueta Series), c. 1978 -
Volcán, 1979 -
Volcán, 1979 -
Gunpowder Silueta (Fundamento Palo Monte), 1980 -
La Venus Negra (The Black Venus), 1981 -
Birth (Gunpowder Works), 1981 -
Untitled, 1981 -
Untitled, c.1981–84 -
Untitled, c.1983–84 -
Untitled, c.1984–85
Press
Exhibitions
Books
News
Ana Mendieta & Michelle Stuart
‘LUCY R. LIPPARD: NOTES FROM THE RADICAL WHIRLWIND’, NEW MEXICO MUSEUM OF ART: UNTIL 9 AUGUST
Ana Mendieta
‘SEVERAL ETERNITIES IN A DAY: FORMS IN THE AGE OF LIVING MATERIALS’, HAMMER MUSEUM, LOS ANGELES: UNTIL 23 AUGUST
Ana Mendieta & Hannah Wilke
‘BODY. IDEAL, GAZE, FREEDOM’, GOTHENBURG MUSEUM OF ART: UNTIL 17 JANUARY 2027
Birgit Jürgenssen, Ana Mendieta & Dorothea Tanning
‘ANIMAL!? AN EXHIBITION OF MASTERPIECES’, FONDS HÉLÈNE & ÉDOUARD LECLERC POUR LA CULTURE, LANDERNEAU
Ana Mendieta
‘POETRY OF FIRE: CHROMATIC EXPERIMENTS IN THE FILMS OF ANA MENDIETA, DEREK JARMAN, AND P.STAFF’, FILM SCREENING, DISCUSSION, AND BOOK SIGNING
Ana Mendieta
in ‘EXAPNDING LANDSCAPES: PAINTING AFTER LAND ART’, ABBOTT HALL, LAKELAND ART, LAKE DISTRICT
Birgit Jürgenssen & Ana Mendieta
in ‘PLACE TO DREAM’, KUNSTEN MUSEUM OF MODERN ART AALBORG, DENMARK
Ana Mendieta
in ‘Earthshaker’, 3-person exhibition with Derek Jarman & P.Staff, Del Vaz Projects, Santa Monica, California
Birgit Jürgenssen, Ana Mendieta & Hannah Wilke
in ‘Vital Signs: Artists and the Body’, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Ana Mendieta
in ‘Mysterious Ways: Art, Faith and Transcendence’, The Glucksman, University College Cork
Ana Mendieta & Birgit Jürgenssen
in ‘The Irreplaceable Human – Conditions of Creativity in the Age of AI’ at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk
Ana Mendieta & Lygia Clark
in ‘Action, Gesture, Performance: Feminism, the Body and Abstraction’, Whitechapel Gallery, London
Ana Mendieta
in ‘Zin Ex: Body and Architecture’, Tabakalera, International Centre for Contemporary Culture, San Sebastián
Ana Mendieta & Lenore Tawney
in ‘Never Done: 100 Years of Women in Politics and Beyond’, The Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, New York
Robert Mapplethorpe & Ana Mendieta
in ‘Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography’, Barbican, London
Birgit Jürgenssen, Ana Mendieta & Hannah Wilke
in ‘FEMINISMS!’, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona
Lygia Clark, Fernanda Gomes, Ana Mendieta & Michelle Stuart
in ‘The Sensation of Space’, The Warehouse, Dallas