Ana Mendieta: A Retrospective

Ana Mendieta

Ana Mendieta: A Retrospective

New York City, USA: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1987

85 pp., 25.5 x 24.5 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

The first major retrospective of Ana Mendieta’s work opened in November of 1987, just a little over two years after her death. Mendieta fell from the window of the 34th-floor apartment building that she shared with sculptor Carl Andre. She was 36 years old. The couple - married only nine months earlier and on the verge of divorce - had been heard arguing. Neighbours and the door man went on record saying that they had heard her cry out “No” immediately before the fall. 

Andre called 911 and told the operator “My wife is an artist, and I’m an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more exposed to the public than she was. And she went to the bedroom, and I went after her, and she went out the window.” 

When the police arrived to examine the scene, Andre showed the officers catalogs of his work and restated that his wife had been jealous of his fame. The different levels of success in their careers became a frequent point of inquiry in the trial. 

Additionally, the defence used Mendieta’s work to discredit her. The use of blood and soil in her practice was said to represent a subconscious desire to kill herself. Her interests in indigenous occult practices suggested that she was mentally unstable, Andre’s lawyers argued. 

“The defendant’s guilt was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt,” the presiding judge announced, on February 12th, 1988, acquitting Andre on charges of murder. 

Ana Mendieta: A Retrospective surveyed the growth and change in Mendieta’s career and included thirty documentary colour photographs of her Silueta series; black and white photographs of Cuban rock carvings; early drawings on leaves; floor sculptures made from sand and earth; and videotape documentation of multiple performance works.”

The catalogue includes thirty-four b/w and twelve colour images, a preface by Marcia Tucker, and essays by Petra Barreras del Rio and John Perrault. 

“I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette). I believe this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source.”

- Ana Mendieta