How Ana Mendieta made land art her own
Simon Schama, The Financial Times
July 2026
With Frida Kahlo and Tracey Emin packing them in at Tate Modern, it’s hard not to notice that some of the strongest women artists have made their mark with the history of their own bodies.
The dramatic self-scrutiny of those artists has often been tragic: informed by marks of pain and calamity; wounds made somewhat bearable by the strenuous act of art-making. Those images might be brutally unsparing or freely self-promoting but, either way, they supply the elements of a persona: a consciously outward-facing character.
In her twenties, Ana Mendieta, the Cuban-American subject of a compelling, often very beautiful survey at Tate Modern, tried on some of this confrontational self-projection. The results are mostly sophomoric: thickly modelling her hair with shampoo so it stood out from and over her face; squashing her features against glass, a bit like the young Rembrandt trying on faces in the mirror to rehearse characters in his histories. […]