In a brief yet prolific career, the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta® created groundbreaking work in photography, film, video, drawing, sculpture, and site-specific installations. Amongst the major themes in her work are exile, displacement, and a return to the landscape, which remain profoundly relevant today. Her unique hybrid of form and documentation, works that she titled "siluetas," are fugitive and potent traces of the artist's inscription of her body in the landscape, often transformed by natural elements such as fire and water.
The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC, in collaboration with Galerie Lelong & Co., catalogued and digitized the entirety of Mendieta's moving image works, discovering that the artist remarkably made more than 100 in the ten-year period in which she worked in the medium. The groundbreaking exhibition of her moving image works, Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta, was organized by the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota in 2014, and has since travelled to several institutions worldwide, including NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Florida; University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; and the Galerie nationale du Jeu
de Paume, Paris. In 2023, the major solo exhibition Ana Mendieta: Search for Origin was held at MO.CO Montpellier Contemporain, France and will travel to MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain and Musée des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.
Mendieta's work has been the subject of six major museum retrospectives, Ana Mendieta: Traces, was organized by the Hayward Gallery, England, in 2013, and travelled to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria, and the Galerie Rudolfinum, Czech Republic. Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972-1985 was organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., in 2005 and travelled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; and Miami Art Museum, Florida.
Mendieta was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1948, and died in New York City in 1985.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York, New York
Ongoing
by Holland Cotter
by Priscilla Frank
by Rachel Spence
