Performance Artist – Ana Mendieta

Ana Mendieta

Cuba Artist- Performance Art, Video, Earth Art, Sculpture

“My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the Universe. It is a return to the maternal source.”

—Ana Mendieta

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. 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.

Best known for her earth-body performances, Mendieta, explored female identity through photography, film, and sculpture. Her life was quite turbulent – when she was just 12, she was exiled from Cuba and sent to an orphanage in Iowa, United States. Mendieta used to search for and address important contact of displacement, violence, and sexuality in her work, performing in various outdoor locations. She has always wanted to invoke the time of magic, knowledge, and power of primitive art.

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