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Video screening of works by
Ana Mendieta
Thursday, November 11
10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m., continuously
The screening is free and open to all.
Ana Mendieta was exiled from Cuba, her native
country, in 1961, just before the outbreak of the Cuban Revolution.
Much of her work expresses the pain and rupture of cultural displacement
and resonates with visceral metaphors of death, rebirth, and
spiritual transformation. A seminal figure in feminist art practice
of the 1970s, Mendieta devised an emblematic, at times mythical
female iconography. |
In 1972 Mendieta began making
ritualistic performances and haunting earthworks in which she
immersed or inscribed her own body within nature. Blood, fire,
water, and other natural elements are essential to her highly
personal, often mystical vocabulary. Burial and regeneration
are recurrent themes. Mendieta’s ephemeral "earth/
body sculptures" and provocative  performances were documented through
film, video, and photography. Whether painting her body with
blood or burning, carving, and inscribing female symbols into
the landscape, as in her Silueta series, Mendieta infused her
work with enormous power and poetry.
She wrote: "I have been carrying on a dialogue between
the landscape  and
the female body (based on my own silhouette). . . . I am overwhelmed
by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). Through
my earth/ body sculptures I become one with the earth . . . I
become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension
of my body."
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