Ana Mendieta

During her short career, Ana Mendieta (1948–85) created a body of work that was provocative and radically inventive. Using her own body, together with elemental materials--blood, fire, earth and water--she created visceral tableaux and ephemeral "earth-body" sculptures exploring life, death, rebirth and spiritual transformation. Much of her art also expresses the pain and rupture of cultural displacement and exile (Mendieta was born in Cuba, but sent to the US as a child). In her work, the outline of her body is consumed by gunpowder, fireworks, or advancing waves; and ancient goddess-forms are shaped from sand, carved into rock or incised into clay or onto leaves. The media are exceptionally diverse, but the images are consistently compelling, mysterious and poetic.
Encompassing a wealth of drawings, photography and film, Ana Mendieta: Traces provides a comprehensive and illuminating overview of this highly influential artist’s work. Essays by art historians Julia Bryan-Wilson and Adrian Heathfield, as well as Stephanie Rosenthal, Chief Curator at Hayward Gallery, provide an array of new approaches to Mendieta’s practice. This publication also includes a wide-ranging and richly illustrated anthology of never-before-seen material, including Mendieta’s own notebooks, exhibition plans and correspondence, the result of unparalleled access to the Ana Mendieta Archive. Filled with new imagery, ephemera and scholarship, Ana Mendieta: Traces provides a comprehensive introduction to this major twentieth-century artist, as essential for Mendieta experts as for those coming to her work for the first time.

This major monograph, a comprehensive reconsideration of the brief life and career of Ana Mendieta, contextualizes the artist's work within its time and acknowledges her legacy on subsequent generations of artists. The Cuban-born American sculptor is celebrated for her earth-body works of the 1970s, sculptural interventions in the landscape that placed her body--or its haunting silhouette--in symbiotic relationship with nature. Using extracts from her films, original slide documentation, photography, and other archival material, this catalogue illustrates early performances from Mendieta's student days, as well as her more well-known Silueta Series made in Iowa and Mexico from 1973 to 1980. Earth-body works executed in Canada, Cuba and the United States in the early 1980s, and select sculptures, drawings and installations dating to the mid-80s will also be illustrated. This publication promises to be the definitive study of the artist's work.

This monograph on the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta provides the most comprehensive overview of her career available in English. From her early performances to her Land Art works, sculptures, and drawings, examples from all phases of her career--from the late 1960s to her death in 1985-- are considered here in extensive color plates, several in-depth essays, and writings by the artist.