Cart 0. Sign In My Account. Back News. Back Events Feminist Press. Add To Cart. Facebook 0 Twitter Pinterest 0. She went on to study her MFA from , before taking the innovative Intermedia Art programme under the tutelage of Hans Breder, who would become her lover and collaborator.
In , Mendieta was deeply effected by the brutal rape and murder of fellow student Sarah Ann Offens, whose body was discovered on the same campus on which the artist lived. In doing so, Mendieta joins artists such as Marina Abramovic, Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneemann in using her body to protest the sexual violence that women have endured for centuries.
Their work was an exploration of the performance required daily of all Women. Santeria combines elements of Roman Catholicism with the customs of the Yoruba tribes of modern day Benin and Nigeria. In a Artist statement, she addresses this theory:.
I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body based on my own silhouette. I believe this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland Cuba during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb nature.
My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source. Mendieta unraveled her relationship to the Earth and to her femininity by creating imprints of her naked body on the land in places she held especially dear, such as Cuba, Mexico, and Iowa. She would then remove herself and denote the resulting outline, or silhouette, with specific colors or materials that would evoke these places of personal identification.
In one of her best-known pieces, entitled Imagen de Yagul , the artist uncommonly remains in the resulting photograph lying in a Zapotec tomb, her nude body covered with white flowers. The foliage that obscures Mendieta's face and seems to grow from her body turns her unclothed form into both a lifeless corpse and a place of great fecundity. Mendieta's use of the abstracted feminine form that has become fused with the landscape may also denote her finally finding home in the more universal Mother Earth and an acceptance of the cycles of life and death.
It also eloquently speaks to her concerns surrounding belonging and rootedness, and an underlying reliance on her female mysticism. Untitled Blood and Feathers 2 is a three and a half minute Super-8 film accompanied by 35mm slides documenting a performance undertaken by the artist while she was a graduate student. It shows Mendieta standing naked in front of a flowing creek, looking directly at the camera while pouring blood out of a flask and down the front of her body. She then reaches behind her, pours the remaining blood down her back, and casts the empty container aside.
The artist then falls into a heap of white feathers and slowly rolls around as they adhere to her bloodied form. The film ends with Mendieta standing slowly, her arms bent to resemble wings - a position she holds for the final moments of the film. This environment of the piece - the flowing creek in an unpopulated spot of nature - and its use of elemental materials - the blood, the feathers, the naked female body - are reminiscent of religious rituals.
Blood is central to Catholic rites, the religion in which Mendieta was raised, and the sacrifice of animals is a vital part of Santeria, an Afro-Caribbean religion the artist would draw on for inspiration repeatedly. Blood and Feathers hints at a self-flagellating type of renewal often practiced by devotees in faiths where bloodletting equals cleansing or purification.
It also presents the idea that as one life becomes sacrificed, another more pure one may emerge. The consistency of this sort of physical transformation in Mendieta's work from female to bird, or female back to raw form, shows an impetus within the artist to transcend the physical limitations of the body toward a more spiritual existence.
Mendieta once said about her artwork: "I have thrown myself into the very elements that produced me. In this particular piece, the artist created an outline of her body on the beach at La Ventosa, Mexico and filled the imprint with red tempera.
As the tide rose and the ocean waves washed over it, the shape gradually eroded away and the color dissipated into the sea until finally, nothing remained. The powerful work washed away all evidence of the artist's presence. In this photo, we see a stone niche high in the walls of a Mexican monastery complex called Cuilapan de Guerrero that frames a chilling, ghost-like white figure smeared with what at first glance we intuit as blood.
Upon closer look, we find the form is the artist wrapped in a white sheet, the front of her body creating a red stain on the fabric. The figure could be a robed Madonna, but the red, skeletal imprint unsettles these associations and reveals Mendieta's interest in indigenous religious practices such as human sacrifice.
Mendieta was highly critical of the historical imposition of Catholicism upon indigenous peoples. This piece signifies her criticism by subverting this convent's history of evangelization through positioning her ritualistic piece within the hallowed vaulted alcove meant to display Catholic religious figures. The piece also evinces Mendieta's interest in the roots of Cuban Santeria - a time during which black slaves masked their "Santero" divinities under Catholic names so that they could worship without the fear of punishment at the hand of slave owners.
By Mendieta's Siluetas and films had given way to a body of work consisting of forms carved into rock, made from sand, or etched into clay. She created a series of these works while in Cuba in , and collectively entitled the pieces Esculturas Rupestres rock sculptures. She chose naturally formed grottos in a national park outside of Havana where pre-Hispanic peoples once lived as the setting for these abstract, spiritual figures.
According to the scholar Maria del Mar Lopez-Cabrales, these works "show a strong consciousness of gender," and are in "union with the rest of the women on the earth and the Taino feminine deities. Mendieta meant for these pieces to be discovered by park-goers, but most of the etchings have disappeared and only photographic evidence of them remains.
Content compiled and written by Alicia Lopez. Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Kimberly Nichols. The Art Story. Ways to support us. Movements and Styles: Feminist Art. I had to go to the source of life, to mother earth. My earth-body sculptures are not the final stage of a ritual but a way and a means of asserting my emotional ties with nature and conceptualizing religion and culture. My works are the irrigation veins of this universal fluid.
Through them ascend the ancestral sap, the original beliefs, the primordial accumulations, the unconscious thoughts that animate the world.
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