Decades after her death, a Cuban American artist’s bold innovations are finally coming into focus. Plus:
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Before Ana Mendieta, the Cuban American artist, became a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, in 1983, she’d never had a studio of her own. Five years earlier, as an ambitious twenty-nine-year-old, she’d moved to New York City in the depths of winter, and soon rented a poky, dark apartment on the ground floor of a building in Greenwich Village. “Desolate” was how she described the place. She scavenged planks of wood for shelves and a table, and she carved out a workspace for herself beneath a loft bed, which had a mattress that she’d dragged in from the street.

The limitations of the space didn’t matter so much, though, given the artistic path that Mendieta was forging. She had originally seen herself as a painter, but she’d more or less relinquished the medium by 1972, the year she finished a graduate degree in the subject at the University of Iowa. “My paintings were not real enough for what I wanted the image to convey,” she once explained. “And by real I mean I wanted my images to have power, to be magic.” Instead of creating conventional canvases or sculptures—works that needed wall or floor space to be made and displayed—Mendieta had developed an artistic practice that might combine performance, land art, and an instrumental use of her own body. In 1982, Mendieta had staged one such work, “Body Tracks,” at Franklin Furnace, a multidisciplinary venue in what was then the cast-iron wilderness of Tribeca. A small audience assembled in a room where three large blank sheets of paper had been affixed to a wall. On the floor was a basin filled with a viscous liquid, tempera paint mixed with animal blood that was likely procured from a slaughterhouse. Then Mendieta—an energetic and diminutive woman, just five feet tall, if that—walked in, to the accompaniment of a drumbeat, dressed in a baggy white ensemble. She drenched her hands and arms in the mixture, reached to the top of one piece of paper, then forcefully smeared her limbs down the surface to make two bloody tracks, ending up on her knees on the floor. Mendieta performed this action twice more before absenting herself, leaving the audience to contemplate the visceral imprints she left behind.