Artist Ana Mendieta: Background information when reading Anita de Monte Laughs Last

Artist Ana Mendieta

This article relates to Anita de Monte Laughs Last

The title character in Xochitl Gonzalez's Anita de Monte Laughs Last is closely based on the artist Ana Mendieta. Although Mendieta's shocking death at the age of thirty-five has overshadowed her artistic legacy in the public imagination, Mendieta was a rising star at the time of her death, and her creative work continues to hold relevance today.

Born in Cuba in 1940, Ana Mendieta was the second of Ignacio and Raquel Mendieta's three children. In 1952, Ana, age 12, and her sister Raquelin, 14, were sent to America as part of a program known as the Peter Pan Project. In the years immediately following the Cuban Revolution, Cuban children were sent alone to America by parents panicked over erroneous reports that the new Castro government was planning to "terminate parental rights, assume custody of all Cuban children, prohibit religion and indoctrinate them into communism." Though those threats never came to fruition, between 1960 and 1962, over 14,000 unaccompanied minors, ages 6–18, were put on airplanes and flown to Miami.

The sisters were initially sent together to an Iowa reform school, where beatings and confinement were common punishments, and then separated and sent to a series of foster homes. "Ana felt," according to journalist Shawn O'Hagan, "abandoned by her family and isolated from her homeland. She did not see her mother and brother again until 1966, or her father, who was jailed for disloyalty to Castro, until 1979. He died soon after arriving in America." The experience certainly shaped Mendieta and her later artistic work.

In college, Ana Mendieta studied painting at the University of Iowa. She became a student in the university's Intermedia Program, created by German artist Hans Breder. Inspired by European radical conceptual art, the program encouraged students to "throw off creative constraint" and explore a wide variety of artistic forms, including video and performance art. As a student, Mendieta was able to meet a number of contemporary avant-garde artists who visited the program. Breder and Mendieta also had a ten-year romantic relationship, and she was featured in his 1973 photo series "La Ventosa."

In the 1970s, Mendieta spent several summers in Mexico, which she described as "like going back to the source, being able to get some magic just by being there." She created a number of installations that incorporated parts of her body (or silhouettes or footprints) into a natural landscape. She also used elements such as stones, flowers, driftwood, bark and leaves in her work, using the term "earth body" to refer to her installations.

According to the curators of a 2024 Mendieta exhibit in León, Spain, "Ana Mendieta created a powerful body of work defined by the body and its encounter with nature." In her 15-year career, she "developed her own hybrid practice, which fused aspects of 'body art' and 'land art.'" Mendieta worked in multiple mediums including video, photographs, installations, drawings and paintings.

Mendieta moved to New York in 1978 and there became friends with some of the leading feminist artists of the day. She also met and fell in love with the sculpture Carl Andre. The two were in many ways opposite—he was methodical and liked routines, she was more spontaneous and intense. Their relationship became combative at times. The couple split, and Mendieta moved to Rome, a city that she loved. She told friends that it was "a cross between Cuba and New York" and that "she felt accepted there in a way she never was in America."

Mendieta and Andre reunited and held a small, private wedding in Rome in January of 1985. Then they returned to New York. Early in the morning of September 8, 1985, Ana Mendieta fell out of a 34th floor apartment. Many believed that Andre was guilty of pushing or throwing her out during a drunken argument; the police reported that Andre had scratches on his body, and neighbors reported hearing Ana's cries just before she fell. However, Andre was eventually acquitted of Mendieta's murder on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence.

Today, a growing number in the art community hope to move attention away from Ana Mendieta's death to her life, recognizing the important legacy she has left behind. The exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León points this out: Through "relationship with the visible and the invisible, the permanent and the ephemeral," she found "her way of making the unspeakable explained through the trace of the body and its insertion into nature….Ana Mendieta never stopped reinventing herself."

Catalog from 2024 Ana Mendieta exhibition, courtesy of Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León

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This article relates to Anita de Monte Laughs Last. It first ran in the May 1, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.