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History of Art - WAS - Lecture 8 - Ana Mendieta, Silueta Series,
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Lecture notes of 4 pages for the course World Art Studies at UL (College notes)
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World of Art Part II – Identities (lecture 6-8) of Part III AgencyCollege 8 (14/11) Ana Mendieta, Silueta Series, 1973-1978
In the seventies, Mendieta burned, carved and molded her silhouette into the beaches, forests and
caves of the United States, Mexico and Cuba. Temporarily altering the landscapes as well as the
relationship humans commonly establish with it, Mendieta demonstrated what land art could also be.
What is Ana Mendieta trying to achieve through her art?
Mendieta used her art to explore the intense loss of being displaced from her family and homeland
due to political exile
Why was Ana Mendieta important?
She is considered one of the most influential Cuban-American artists of the post-World War II era.
How did Ana Mendieta impact the world?
Her innovative site-specific sculpture, earth art (created with soil), drawing, films,
and performance art shocked and challenged audiences.
How did Ana Mendieta change the world?
Accomplishments. Mendieta was a key figure in the Body art movement that
emerged from the Performance art movement. Her sustained use of the body's
simplified and oRen nude form to depict both presence and its opposite, absence is
an essenSal component to her work whether denoSng the human or the ethereal.
Why did Ana Mendieta create the Silueta series?
used a typology of abstracted feminine forms, through which she hoped to access an
“omnipresent
female force.”
the multidisciplinary artist Ana Mendieta is remembered for a richly realized oeuvre that fused Afro-
Cuban religious traditions with feminist thought and questions of ecology. Her “earth-body” artworks
famously used the natural world and her own body as powerful mediums of expression, interrogating
humanity's relationship to the land and the cosmos.
From her early years when she was separated from her Cuban family to become an adopted refugee
in America throughout her adolescent years when she felt like an outsider growing up in the Midwest,
the young artist felt an ever-present disconnection from the concepts of mother, place, identity,
belonging, and home. For 15 of her 37 years, she explored this ache through her work, which was
primarily performance, photography, and film-based.
She aimed to jostle the nonchalance of people in ways that would provoke them to connect with each
other more authentically, to understand that they were essentially one within humanity, and that the
earth was the supreme mother to all. The ongoing dialogue between her own body and the landscape
regarding presence, absence, and the inevitable cycles within nature and life would come to be seen
as an eerie foretelling of her tragic end when she fell from the window of an apartment building.
Body art through
Performance art à Her sustained use of the body's simplified and often nude form to depict both
presence and its opposite, absence is an essential component to her work whether
denoting the human or the ethereal.
Land art à a movement in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked,
taking the possibilities of art outside gallery confines. She used the natural
environment as a perpetual setting throughout her career, most memorably in her
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