The mystery of Ana Mendieta
In a gorgeous, ethereal image from her Siluetas series (1973–78) Ana Mendieta, the Cuban-American performance artist, sculptor, painter and video artist, lies on the ground with thousands of flowers appearing to grow from her life-giving body. In another image, Sweating Blood (1973), blood trickles down the artist’s face. This is her work, which she termed ‘earth-body’: by turns resonant and unsettling, as eloquent today as it was at the time of her death more than 30 years ago, when her stature as an artist was beginning to be recognised.
A belated obituary in 2018 described her art as “ambitious and audacious”, “sometimes violent, unapologetically feminist and usually raw”. Born in Havana, Cuba in 1948, Ana Mendieta was floor of her Greenwich Village apartment in the early hours of September 8, 1985. A doorman in the street below heard a woman screaming “No! No! No!” followed by the sound of Mendieta’s body landing on a nearby roof, like “an explosion”.
