Customer Reviews

Ana Mendieta: Earth Body

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This book fills a gap in the Art History of the 20th Century as it celebrates Ana Mendieta's life. Her work links several different aspects of art and therefor defies being categorized. The sculpture grows the female form in landscape in many unique and very beautiful ways. It is tough, fragile, compelling, poignant and challenging all at the same time and contributes to our knowledge and appreciation of our place in the world and the part that art plays to enrich and inform. As a working artist I admit to being more excited about her work than I have been for a long time. Although her life was tragically and violently cut short after only eighteen creative working years she is up with the trail blazing artists of this time. Olga Viso does her memory justice. I think that this is a terrific book.

If you are only going to buy one book on Ana Mendieta this is the one to get. The book is actually an exhibition catalogue from the most recent retrospective of Mendieta's work that was shown at the Whitney Museum as well as at the Hirshhorn Museum. Hence, it's beautifully and extensively illustrated (with lots of colour images).

There are four essays in the book, the long introductory essay by the curator Olga Viso, which summarises most of the scholarship on Mendieta. This essay is meticulously researched and many of the ideas about Mendieta and her work are carefully revised. The book is worth it just for this essay alone. In addition there are essays by other scholars: Julia Herzberg on the early works of Mendieta (based on excellent doctoral research), and Chrissie Iles focuses on Mendieta's much neglected films.

Ana Mendieta was only in her early 40s when she died in 1985. Born in Havana, Cuba, she came to the U. S. as a political refugee with her family when she was 12. Beginning in her artistic training at the U. of Iowa, she incorporated feminist and multicultural leanings into the conceptual art, land art, photography, and performance art she practiced with equal intensity and innovation. No matter what type of art she engaged in, Mendieta used her own body, or sometimes images or impressions of it, as a medium. With earth, blood, streams, shoreline, trees, and foliage, Mendieta meant to teach viewers about the close, intimate connection between a person's body and the natural world. With other art works, she makes statements about the savagery of rape and tyranny. No matter what point she means to convey or type of art she engages in, Mendieta's art is distinguished by its exceptional rawness. While the rawness is often inevitably provocative, it strikes one mostly as unaltered, immediate reality. The copious photographic record of Mendieta's art with essays by art experts who knew her or are familiar with her is a comprehensive appreciation of the short career of this artist who work both strikingly and complexly mixes artistic, political, and cultural elements of contemporary society.