Ana Mendieta

‘Where is Ana Mendieta?’ was the question ringing around the halls of the Tate Modern’s Blavatnik Building just over 10 years ago. It was June 2016, at an opening party for the Tate Modern’s shiny new £260m wing, when around 150 activists invaded the gallery to hold a vigil for the Cuban-American artist who died in 1985 at just 36 years old. Dressed in black and holding funeral flowers, the group had marched across Millennium Bridge carrying banners and placards, before gathering outside the Tate to read poems and share thoughts about Mendieta and her work. 

The demonstration was organised in response to the gallery’s decision to display works by Mendieta’s husband, and alleged killer, Carl Andre. A revered modernist sculptor 13 years her senior, Andre was controversially acquitted of murdering his wife, a severe acrophobic, when she fell to her death from the window of his 34th-floor Greenwich Village apartment in the early hours of Sunday 8 September 1985, after neighbours heard them arguing into the night.

As a rising star of New York’s avant-garde feminist art scene, there’s no knowing what brilliant work Mendieta might still be producing if her career hadn’t been cut tragically short just as she was entering her prime. And despite her friends and family members having long campaigned for her groundbreaking practice not to be obscured by the violent manner of her death, it’s unfortunate that demonstrations outside of Carl Andre exhibitions have been a lot of fans’ introduction to Mendieta’s visceral, primal works spanning performance, sculpture, land art, photography and video. 

For Ana Mendieta’s first major UK gallery exhibition to be mounted in the very same building that was the focus of that protest a decade ago therefore feels significant. By staging it in tandem with the brilliant Tracey Emin: A Second Life and the record-breakingly popular Frida: The Making of an Icon, the Tate could be seen to be making the case that Mendieta’s oeuvre is up there alongside that of two of the last century’s most celebrated women artists. 

At the very least, the curators of Ana Mendieta are keen for the work to be considered on its own merits. The exhibition makes no mention of her husband and avoids dwelling on biographical details, arranging pieces via loose themes rather than chronological order, with scant context provided via wall texts.

A deeply affecting study of an artist who would be a household name if she were still alive

Entering into a cave-like room dappled with sunlight shining through the building’s latticed brick walls, visitors first encounter a series of pieces exploring Mendieta’s fascination with the cave. Carved into the limestone caves of Cuba’s Jaruco State Park on her return in 1981, and named after the goddesses of the island’s indigenous Taíno people, her Rupestrian Sculptures call to mind prehistoric lifeforms, Palaeolithic drawings, or perhaps the chromosomes of a mythical sea beast. 

Among her best-known works, her decade-long Siluetas series sees Mendieta use sand, twigs, mud and even gunpowder to imprint herself onto the landscape, at first literally covering her own naked body in flowers and leaves, later leaving a mere impression, a ghostly outline among the trees; ethereal, ephemeral, utterly haunting. Translating the same ideas into a gallery setting, her Sandwoman floor sculptures make use of sand and soil from meaningful places in her life, and recall Stone Age flint tools, mythological labyrinths or maybe the swirly patterns on an ancient seed pod. ‘Where do I belong in the world?’ she’s asking, ‘and what kind of mark will I leave behind?’

Not all of the work here is presented quite as powerfully. By Mendieta’s own admission, her early career paintings aren’t imbued with the same ‘magic’ as her more corporeal pieces. The thematic curation is somewhat muddled towards the end of the exhibition. In their resolve not to linger on the artist’s biography, the curators have neglected to provide much context for some of the more challengingly experimental videos, and have slightly glossed over her eerily prescient pieces examining violence against women. 

Still, the piece playing in front of the exit is a short film called ‘Bird Run’, in which a spirited Mendieta dances on a desolate beach, naked apart from a covering of luminous white feathers – might be interpreted as a poignant message about rebirth, and this exhibition is no doubt vindicating for those who have mourned Mendieta’s erasure from art history. A deeply affecting study of an artist who would surely be a household name if she were still alive today, it will hopefully serve to introduce a new audience to her timeless, magical, invigorating work.