A film projects the image of a woman standing still with her arms spread against a wall, slowly sliding her body down and leaving red paint smears of what appears to be a birth canal. The woman is Ana Mendieta, and this retrospective of her 15-year career entitled “Earth Body” at the Hirshhorn Museum exhibits her visceral sculpture and performance art.
Mendieta’s work explores her relationship with the earth and the further connection between the human body and world. The evolution of Mendieta’s work makes visible her own changes and growth through the ‘70s and ‘80s.
Born in Cuba in 1948, Mendieta was exiled at age 13 with 14,000 other children and aided by the Catholic Church in the United States. This transplanted childhood, which left Mendieta in Iowa with an American family, created a hole that she would learn to fill with art. Torn away from her roots, art became her grip on the natural world, and she attempted to find her place through the multi-media performance studies that she developed.
As a college student in the ‘70s, Mendieta focused on new media for presentation and cutting edge themes. In a sequence of photographs entitled “Facial Hair Transplant, 1972” Mendieta shaved her friend’s beard and glued it piece by piece onto her face. The art lies in the development of the beard; it starts as a part of him, transitions, then finally becomes a beard on a woman. The piece moves the focus from the final product, which is what art had traditionally been, to the process, and the very idea of putting a beard on a woman. This act of questioning gender roles and expectations characterized her early art.
In her search for a connection to the earth, Mendieta used animal blood in her body art. She made prints by covering parts of her body in a mix of paint and blood and then smearing the canvas. She also poured blood on her nude body and rolled in feathers. To Mendieta, blood was not something that suggested death, but rather life. Blood was a grounding, ephemeral symbol whose brilliant red added a striking edge to her art.
A blood theme was not only life affirming, but also inspired her to integrate Latin American culture into her art. Mendieta learned about native Mexican tribes such as the Aztec, Zapotec and Maya, which all used blood in their sacrifice rituals. She enveloped her body in the Mexican landscape to develop her Silueta series of art. In one photograph, Mendieta lays against a cave wall with flowers and plants covering herself, with just enough skin showing to suggest a body beneath the flora. This union with the plants and ground around her represented her idea of rooting herself within the earth. The Silueta series developed through the mid-’70s and blossomed into the portrayal of her female form in natural found materials.
Mendieta’s Silueta series ended in the early ‘80s. She first returned to Cuba in 1980, and over the course of the next three years developed strong relationships with her native art community. During this time, she was the only exile to exhibit her art in Cuba.
The Silueta series’ naturalism led to the Rupestrian series, which were a collection of carved-rock sculptures created in a national park outside of Havana. These works focused on rock carvings of amorphic, pre-historic designs, rather than the human forms she had worked with in the past. In her “Shell of Venus, 1982,” raised coiled circles of stone and dirt lay within each other and lead the eye to the center oval, which emulates the female birth canal. Situated above this vaginal symbol is another snake-like coil, which forms two circles representing breasts and loops above to suggest a head.
After three years in Cuba, Mendieta began creating commissioned art. While taking residency at the American Academy in Rome in 1985, she fell out of a window, cutting short a rich and prolific career.
Mendieta’s growth through her decade and a half of work is something that many artists strive to achieve. Rather than be summed up by one medium or one theme, she was able to develop her ideas about life and art as she redefined her identity as an exiled Cuban. Though only Mendieta herself could know if she found what she was looking for, the art she left in the process is enough to create an intriguing exhibit of a woman’s life.
Ana Mendieta: Earth and Body will be on exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum, located at Independence Avenue S.W. at Seventh Street, through Jan 2, 2005.
