THE ART OF ANA MANDIETA.

Τhe Cuban artist, Ana Mendieta had a short but intense and productive artistic life. Through performances, body art, photographs, drawings and sculptures, she explored questions of ecology and feminism. She liked to examine the systems of social categorization such as gender, race and class and all their complexities in a way that provoked in her art an extreme sense of mysticism, transculturalism and feminism. Also included were religious themes from Catholicism and Santeria. Mendieta formed these ideas and worked in the United States without ever leaving out her Cuban roots. From the beginning, she used her body as her primary source of artistic reflection and to revise the feminine figure as an iconographic symbol. In her performances during the 70s, Ana explored with her own body the sexuality of woman with hopes of transcending the dependency of the physical body and social barriers in order to gain psychological autonomy. The second phase of her career consisted of a series of human silhouettes executed directly onto natural landscapes. These works echoed the union between the body and nature; the links between us and the universe. Because she used nature and her works were site specific and ephemeral, they were mostly documented with photographs and Super-8 film.
As a young child living in Havana, Cuba, Mendieta lived in upper-middle class society as the second daughter of Ignacio Alberto Mendieta de Lizaur and Raquel Oti de Rojas, both of privileged and political families. She had a comfortable life and was a devout Catholic, but her exposure to the house servants and their practices of Santeria greatly influenced her and remained with her even after she was moved to Dubuque, Iowa during Operation Peter Pan. Mendieta was twelve when her father refused to support Fidel Castro and was blacklisted, resulting in his later incarceration and a long separation between him, Mendieta and her mother. Mendieta and her sister, Raquelin, were sent to the U.S. and because they had no close relatives were moved through a series of group homes until their mother and brother joined them in Iowa. Needless to say, Mendieta did not fit too well in Dubuque, a white, middle class American community. In her adult life, Mendieta recalled her feelings of displacement and humiliation and found a connection with the collective experience comparable to her own of Negro slaves of Cuba practicing Santeria. Santeria originates from a West African religion of the Yoruba and its mix with Catholicism. It revolves primarily around orishas and sacrifice to nourish them.
An excellent example of Mendieta’s understanding, empathy and veneration for Santeria can be seen in her performance piece, Death of a Chicken, where standing naked she holds a chicken that has just had its head cut off. As the chicken struggles and dies, its blood spurts on Mendieta’s entire body. This performance is not an actual practice in Santeria, but an act inspired by Santeria. (Kuntzmuseum, 90) Mendieta makes a point of breaking away from the practices of Catholicism, Western civilization and typical notions of the “saintly and pure” woman with this cult-inspired ritual.
Also representative of her Afro-Cuban inspirations is a piece called Feathers on Woman in which she covers the body of a woman with white feathers that transform her into a sacrificial white cock of sorts.
During her graduate studies at the University of Iowa, Mendieta created a body of work addressing violence toward women and murder. The first was Rape Scene in which Mendieta posed as the victim naked from the waist down and her motionless body tied over a table. The room she was in had broken plates and glasses as well as cigarette butts in an ashtray and blood in a toilet bowl. This performance was a recreation of a rape murder as it was reported that happened at the University of Iowa that same year.
Perhaps what Mendieta is most recognized for are her earth art pieces. Her earth-body works, or Silueta Series—sculptural interventions in the landscape that inserted her naked figure (or its outline or contours) in a natural setting—fused aspects of conceptual, process, performance, body, feminist, and land art. Embracing the aims of feminism, Mendieta quietly subverted the monumental gestures of male land artists by working at a human scale in the landscape. Mendieta did not aggressively shape or add to her environment. Instead, she united with what was there—water, earth, fire. In an early filmed performance, Ana lay in a creek naked while water flowed over her until she practically became one with the stream bed. In others, she printed her shape onto the ground, tree or rock.
In Ana’s works in nature, she primarily touches on the themes of the earth as mother, giver of life and the unity and cycle that exists between humans and the environment. For her, these pieces do not represent much relation to organized religion, for instance the Christian notion of heaven and hell, redemption and a judging God. Instead, she takes a different view:
“There is no original past to redeem: there is the void, the orphanhood, the unbaptized earth of the beginning, the time that from within the earth looks upon us. There is above all the search for origin. I have thrown myself into the very elements that produced me.” (Kuntzmuseum, 90)
The Tree of Life shows Mendieta standing in front of a large trunk tree covered entirely in mud with her arms raised as in supplication to Mother Earth.
Tragically, Ana Mendieta died at age thirty-six, the result of a fall from an apartment window in New York in 1985. She left over 200 photographs documenting her body works and many films of her sometimes private and sometimes public performances.

From: artpopulus