Ana Mendieta was a Cuban-American artist whose practice spanned performance, earthworks, photography, sculpture, and flm. Mendieta’s works were grounded in nature and the body, exploring identity, exile, and displacement. In the early 1970s, Mendieta, exiled from her home in Cuba, began travelling to pre-Columbian sites in Mexico, learning about Central American and Caribbean religions. Her artistic practice became deeply in fuenced by AfroCuban ritual and the pantheistic Santeria religion. At this time, she also began a series of works entitled the Silueta (Silhouette) series, which she continued to produce throughout the following decade in Mexico and Iowa.
In these Silueta works, Mendieta would insert her form into the landscape using natural elements such as earth, sand, clay, fowers, rock, and grass, often in conjunction with fammable materials like freworks and gunpowder or, in some cases, combined with animal hearts or her handprints. These works, as with many of Mendieta's, also actively engaged with feminism and worked to subvert the monumental gestures of the works by contemporary male artists at the time. After Mendieta’s sudden death at age 36, her husband, artist Carl Andre, was arrested for her murder and controversially acquitted.
The artist’s participation is made possible with support from the US Embassy in Nepal.
Designed & Developed by: Curves n' Colors | Visual identity by: Wkshps
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