IOWA, DÓNDE ESTÁ ANA MENDIETA? By Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder One of t he most influen t i a l
American artists of the 20th century, Ana Mendieta, created her most famous pieces in Iowa during the 1970s, within a few miles of my home on the North Side of Iowa City. From the photographs and films that have captured her performance pieces, we witness Mendieta’s body merging into nature and her sculptures, or siluetas, carved into the earth. She left a trail of blood, soil, and feathers across the campus at the University of Iowa, where she was a student of Art and Intermedia. Mendieta’s work moved between diverse public places, such as alleys and storefronts in downtown Iowa city, but she also found privacy in nature along the banks of the Iowa River and Old Man’s Creek. Mendieta placed herself everywhere and yet, apparently, nowhere. In a place that memorializes artists and writers on the names of buildings and engraved on the sidewalks downtown, Ana Mendieta’s absence glares with a sense of erasure. And yet, Mendieta calls to us in present-day Iowa to change how we relate to our environment and the systems that perpetuate violence against women. As a devotee of Mendieta’s art, I question who is made visible and invisible in public spaces and why.
Im age: “ANA MENDIETA , Silueta Works in Mexico” by QRartguide – George Fishman is licensed with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. 6 · Voices from the Prairie
Each day, I walk past the Black Angel statue in Oakland Cemetery where Mendieta performed an early prototype of what would become her Silueta series. The imposing statue of the Victorian angel of death has become an Iowa City landmark through its many urban legends, which inspired Mendieta to perform an almost-ritualistic dance on the grave, over a dark imprint of her body on stone. As a recurring theme in her work, Mendieta danced a thin line between death and life. I have no access to the film of her performance “The Black Angel” (1975), so I am left to imagine her movement through a written description by art historian Jane Blocker and two existing stills. Each time I pass the statue, I ask myself, “Dónde está Ana Mendieta?” Where is Ana Mendieta? emerged as a rally cry after her tragic death in September 1985. Outside of museums such as the Guggenheim and Tate Modern, people protested against domestic violence and the erasure of women artists in the art world. More recently in the twenty-first century, the world has caught up to Mendieta, solidifying her place as a significant artist and a cultural icon. Major museums around the world feature her art and have curated retrospectives. There has also been a proliferation of scholarly and public writing about her art. About 20 years ago, I first encountered Mendieta’s work at an exhibit in New York City. While I can barely remember the details of the exhibit (Was it at PS1? Or the Brooklyn Museum? Which pieces did I see? ), I remember the images of Mendieta making her forehead sweat blood, using panes of glass to distort her body, and gluing facial hair to her face. The exhibit displayed a film of one of her most famous pieces: Untitled (Body Tracks, 1974), where Mendieta holds blood-red forearms against a white wall and sinks to the floor, leaving red traces down the wall in an unclosed V. In the film, Mendieta makes herself so small, and yet somehow communicates a sense of power. As a woman, I registered the tones of violence in the red tracks left behind by blood on Mendieta’s white sweater. But also, as a young Latina in my early twenties, I had never before seen an artist from my culture so prominently featured in a major museum. To have this image of Mendieta leaving her trace
inspired a hope in me that Latinx artists, and people, have a legacy in a country in which we constantly face erasure. I could not imagine that I would one day move to Iowa City and live where Mendieta created these and many other pieces—art that confronts the patriarchal and colonialist systems that still dominate our world. At the age of 12, Mendieta moved to Iowa as part of Operation Peter Pan, a program to relocate children from revolutionary Cuba to the United States. Mendieta and her sister ended up in a Catholic orphanage in Dubuque and then in the foster care system. Although she kept these experiences private, interviews synthesized in Julia Herzog’s dissertation on Ana Mendieta’s life and work revealed the hostile and even abusive environments the Mendieta sisters survived. Mendieta left the safety of her family in Cuba, which at the time was considered a dangerous country, to arrive in Iowa, where she experienced violence in a presumably peaceful place. Then, while Mendieta was attending the University of Iowa, a nursing student, Sarah Ann Ottens, was brutally murdered and possibly sexually assaulted in her dorm room. Mendieta was deeply affected by Ottens’s murder, and she created a series of artworks that were a “personal reaction” to violence
