The Burning, Bleeding, Breathing Art of Ana Mendieta
Emily LaBarge, The New York Times
July 2026
How to show, inside the typically staid and static walls of an institution, artworks that bleed, burn, breathe, ooze, stream, smoke, take flight, disappear? How to present a lifelong oeuvre that eschews linear time? A survey of Ana Mendieta’s work, at Tate Modern in London through Jan. 17, shows how this Cuban American artist pushed against — and sometimes quite literally exploded — conventional boundaries of making, exhibiting and understanding art.
“My work is basically in the tradition of a Neolithic art,” she told the art critic Channing Gray in 1984, distinguishing herself from predominantly male peers involved in Land Art, a movement that involves permanent and frequently drastic interventions in the environment; and the summoning of a sense of deep time beyond the confines of Western art history. […]