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.
