Forget Emin and Kahlo, this is the true star of Tate’s all-female summer
Alastair Sooke, Telegraph
July 2026
Although there was an exhibition of her work at London’s Hayward Gallery in 2013, Britain’s art-loving public may be unfamiliar with Ana Mendieta, the Cuban artist who died in 1985 at the age of 36 after falling from the window of her 34th-floor Greenwich Village apartment in New York. Tate Modern’s brilliant new survey swerves the grisly mystery surrounding her death: the name of her husband, Carl Andre, the minimalist sculptor accused of killing her (but acquitted following a trial), appears only once, in the credit for a book of lithographs which he co-authored with his wife. Instead, the show foregrounds her original, rhapsodic work, which often takes the form of photographs or short films documenting interventions or performances in the natural landscape, and which is seemingly touched with sacred fire. Staged with flair, as well as sensitivity, and crackling throughout with a sense of pagan magic, it deserves to be a word-of-mouth hit. […]