Saturday, October 1, 2022

Ana Mendieta


The Silueta Series (1973–1980) involved Mendieta creating female silhouettes in nature—in mud, sand, and grass—with natural materials ranging from leaves and twigs to blood, and making body prints or painting her outline or silhouette onto a wall.[23]

In a 1981 artist statement, Mendieta said: I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape & the female body (based on my own silhouette). I believe this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source.[24]


                           


  


Ana Mendieta died on September 8, 1985, in New York City, after falling from her 34th-floor apartment in Greenwich Village at 300 Mercer Street. She lived there with her husband of eight months, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, who may have pushed her out the window.[51] She fell 33 stories onto the roof of a deli.[52] Just prior to her death, neighbors heard the couple arguing violently.[34] The neighbors heard Mendieta scream out no and right before her death Andre had scratches all over his face. [53] There were no eyewitnesses to the events that led up to Mendieta's death.[54] A recording of Andre's 911 call showed him saying: "My wife is an artist, and I'm an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, eh, exposed to the public than she was. And she went to the bedroom, and I went after her, and she went out the window."[55] During three years of legal proceedings,[54] Andre's lawyer described Mendieta's death as a possible accident or a suicide. After a nonjury trial, Andre was acquitted of second-degree murder in February 1988.[55]The acquittal caused an uproar among feminists in the art world, and remains controversial to this day.







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