other artists

• Francis Bacon
• Hiroshi Sugimoto
• Alexander Calder
• Willem de Kooning
• Jean Dubuffet
• Alberto Giacometti
• Henri Matisse
• Henry Moore
• Gerhard Richter
• Auguste Rodin
• Ed Ruscha
• David Smith
• Ellsworth Kelly
• Nikki Lee
• Man Ray
• John Baldessari
• Arshile Gorky

in depth: Ana Mendieta

Ana Mendieta (American, born Cuba 1948–1985) is an artist whose career can be distinguished in part by her experimentation with a diverse range of artistic media. As a student at the University of Iowa in Hans Breder’s intermedia program, Mendieta had the opportunity to train in conceptual and performance-based art practices. She used her own body as both subject and media to explore issues of gender and cultural identity. The naked female form inserted in nature became a hallmark of her artistic production as she developed her own self-labeled genre of art, “earth-body art,” which can be described as a hybrid of two 1960s movements: earth art and body art. Her performances, documented with film and photography, often involved interjecting the performing body into nature in order to forge links with an ancestral past and present.

The “Silueta Series” is one of Mendieta’s projects most representative of her study of ancient cultures, fascination with cross-cultural archetypes, and engagement with themes of gender and identity. These performances involved a contour of her body outlined in the earth or her silhouette constructed with leaves, twigs, blood, or various other organic materials.  Mendieta’s paintings and sculptures mirror the ephemeral nature of her “Silueta” performances since she continued to work with organic materials, especially leaves that inevitably become transformed over time.  

Mendieta’s career was explored in detail in a 2004 survey at the Hirshhorn, and the collection now features a number of works that showcase her poetic, performative style.

Adapted from Ana Mendieta: Earth Body (2004), by Olga M. Viso.