{"data":{"id":"3694","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":3694,"topgoose_id":1425,"tms_id":3694,"display_name":"Ana Mendieta","sort_name":"Mendieta Ana","display_date":"1948–1985","begin_date":"1948","end_date":"1985","biography":"\u003cp\u003eThe earthworks, body art, performances, photography, and films Ana Mendieta made in the 1970s and early 1980s reveal an artist deeply connected to nature through the prisms of gender, identity, ritual, and cultural belief. At the age of twelve, Mendieta was sent with her older sister to the United States to escape the Castro regime in Cuba. The girls were resettled in orphanages and foster homes in Dubuque, Iowa—a profound dislocation that would surface in the artist’s mature work. Although she studied painting, Mendieta abandoned the medium in 1972, stating that it wasn’t “real enough. . . . I wanted my images to have power, to be magic.” Her subsequent performative actions, such as wiping her blood-covered arms down a wall in a graceful sweeping gesture, and what she termed earth-body works—for example, placing an effigy into the dirt and lighting it on fire—were attempts to return her body to a more elemental state, one that symbolized sacrifice, regeneration, healing, the feminine, and the entropic cycle of life.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"/collection/works/8245\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eUntitled (Fetish Series, Iowa)\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e documents an ephemeral earth-body work created at Old Man’s Creek, in Iowa City. Mendieta used natural materials, mud and water, to create a figure; pierced with sticks, the form recalls the iconography of martyred Catholic saints, ethnoreligious fetish objects thought to contain supernatural powers, and simple burial mounds. The form would eventually wash back into the creek bed, but for Mendieta the simple act of building it was a way of “reasserting my ties with the earth . . . the reactivation of primeval beliefs . . . [in] an omnipresent female force.”\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\"gray\"\u003eDana Miller and Adam D. Weinberg, \u003ca href=\"https://shop.whitney.org/products/whitney-handbook-of-the-collection\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eHandbook of the Collection\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015), 265.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":false,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500052055","wikidata_id":"Q463639","created_at":"2017-08-30T16:23:46.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-04-25T01:33:31.731-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/3694/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/3694/exhibitions"}}}}