Ana Mendieta: Earth Body : Sculpture and Performance, 1972 - 1985

Book Description
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. With the cool, restrictive rhetoric of postmodernism now largely dissipated, Mendieta's daring amalgams of body and spirit are ready to be appreciated as major achievements. --Micheal Duncan Essays by Olga M. Viso, Guy Brett, Julia P. Herzberg, Chrissie Iles and Laura Roulet. Hardcover, 9.75 x 11 in./256 pgs / 220 color and 100 b & w.


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"This book traces Ana Mendieta's (1948-85) development from the early performance-based works made as a student at the University of Iowa, where she was grounded in the conceptual and body-oriented practices of the 1960s and 1970s, to the creation of independent sculptures and objects in the early 1980s made with fragile, earthen materials. Rooted in nature and in the body, Mendieta's art was inflected by personal identity and femininity, and distinguished by its insistent hybridity. Her earth-body works, or Silueta Series (silhouette series), fused aspects of conceptual, process, performance, body, feminist, and land art. While contributing significantly to these varied dialogues, her work does not fit neatly within any of the accepted terms used to describe artistic activity in the decade." Born in Havana, Cuba, Mendieta came to the United States as a twelve-year-old political refugee. Her personal and professional development was greatly informed by the painful experience of exile as well as the cross-fertilization of Caribbean and North American values. While deeply rooted in her personal experience, Mendieta's art reveals a passionate desire to connect with a wider, collective human heritage. Her aim to unravel layers of individual and social history and unmask latent ethnic, cultural, and gender biases in society, was to foster greater self-awareness and comprehension of the complex diversity of humanity. It is for this reason that her humble yet prolific production as an artist continues to be relevant today. Its meaning has particular resonance in a global society struggling to grasp the overwhelming points of correspondences and differences between individual, nation, and culture.


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