Galerie Lelong & Co. is pleased to announce that the University of Iowa will be holding a special program to celebrate the legacy of the artist Ana Mendieta. Inaugurating the new Ana Mendieta Gallery in the Visual Arts Building is the solo exhibition Ana Mendieta: Universal Energy, accompanied by an opening reception and film screening with the Mendieta family on the late artist’s birthday, November 18.
Mendieta earned her B.A. from the University of Iowa, later acquiring her M.A. in painting, and M.F.A in Intermedia. She remains one of the most influential artists to pass through the University of Iowa, pioneering the Intermedial world of performative and video art. Mendieta’s best known body of work, the Silueta Series (1973-80), consists of earth-body pieces that merge her body with the surrounding landscape. Mendieta reestablished bonds with the land, exploring themes of exile, displacement, and a return to the landscape, which remain profoundly relevant today.
About the Artist
In a brief yet prolific career, the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta® created groundbreaking work in photography, film, video, drawing, sculpture, and site-specific installations. Amongst the major themes in her work are exile, displacement, and a return to the landscape, which remain profoundly relevant today. Her unique hybrid of form and documentation, works that she titled “siluetas,” are fugitive and potent traces of the artist’s inscription of her body in the landscape, often transformed by natural elements such as fire and water.
The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC, in collaboration with Galerie Lelong & Co., recently catalogued and digitized the entirety of Mendieta’s moving image works, discovering that the artist remarkably made more than 100 in the ten-year period in which she worked in the medium. The groundbreaking exhibition of her moving image works, Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta, was organized by the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota in 2014, and has since travelled to several institutions worldwide, including NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Florida; University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; and the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris. Mendieta’s work has been the subject of six major museum retrospectives, the most recent of which, Ana Mendieta: Traces, was organized by the Hayward Gallery, England, in 2013, and travelled to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria, and the Galerie Rudolfinum, Czech Republic. Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972–1985 was organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., in 2005 and travelled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; and Miami Art Museum, Florida.
Mendieta was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1948, and died in New York City in 1985.
