Tate Modern Surveys Ana Mendieta's Earth-Body Mythology
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- Tate Modern's Blavatnik wing hosts a major Ana Mendieta exhibition, opened by a large colour photograph of a ruined ancient site that frames the show in archaeological terms rather than as a conventional retrospective.
- Ana Mendieta (born Havana, 1948; sent to the US at age 12 to flee the revolution; died 1985, age 36) made art from blood, feathers, flowers, sand and gunpowder, drawing human figures on the ground or on tree trunks and igniting them to leave scorched ghost-silhouettes.
- The 'Rupestrian Sculptures' — curvaceous limestone figures carved by Mendieta in a Cuban nature reserve in 1981, two years after her father's release from political prison — resemble fertility goddesses, bat-like or alien forms rising from eroded rock.
- The exhibition deliberately omits discussion of Mendieta's 1985 death from a 34th-floor apartment fall and the accusation against her husband Carl Andre (acquitted of her murder in 1988), reframing her legacy purely on artistic grounds.
- Mendieta merged her own body with nature, covering herself in mud against tree bark so she seemed to vanish into it, and moulded her own hand into a branding iron she used to burn her print into the earth.
- The reviewer positions Mendieta alongside American earthwork artists Robert Smithson (Spiral Jetty, 1970), James Turrell (Roden Crater) and Walter de Maria (Lightning Field) — but argues she is distinct for depicting actual divine figures in a Blake-like personal mythology of half-forgotten ancient goddesses.
Why it matters: By staging the show without engaging Mendieta's controversial death, Tate Modern attempts to install her in the art-historical canon on formal and mythological grounds rather than as a tabloid footnote. The retrospective also surfaces the prescience of her handprint branding-iron work, which anticipated recent archaeological claims that Palaeolithic cave hand stencils may be female.
