This exhibition essay charts Ana Mendieta’s artistic trajectory between 1970 and 1980, including her tenure at the University of Iowa (where she completed two master’s degrees: one in painting and one in intermedia), her time in Mexico, and her direction after her move to New York in 1978. It chronicles Mendieta’s transition away from making Expressionist figurative paintings to working conceptually with her body, as well as in nature, a genre that the text terms “earth-body” works. It argues that her experimentation during this formative period was fundamental to her artistic development, drawing parallels between Mendieta’s production and other works of the 1970s by well-known Conceptual, performance, and feminist artists. It also identifies several direct influences on her production: professors, fellow students, and art critics visiting the University of Iowa from 1970 to 1975. Additionally, the essay discusses Mendieta’s many university-sponsored summer trips to Mexico (between 1971 and 1980), and her developing interest in Mesoamerican art and colonial Catholic references, which she incorporated into her work, resulting in her now-iconic Silueta series.

Julia P. Herzberg is an art historian, independent curator, and Fulbright Senior Specialist living in New York. She completed her PhD in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, in 1998, with a dissertation on Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. She is a specialist of Latin American artists living in the United States, and has curated more than twenty-five exhibitions. Herzberg was a co-curator of The Decade Show (1990), held in New York at the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, the New Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and she was the curator of the official U.S. representation for the III Bienal Internacional de Pintura in Cuenca, Ecuador (1991). In addition to serving as a consulting curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York (1996–2001), she was a consulting curator for the 2003, 2006, and 2009 Bienales de La Habana, and she is a contributing and consulting editor for Arte al día Internacional. Herzberg has taught, lectured, and published extensively in the United States and abroad and received two J. William Fulbright Scholarship Board awards: one at the Pontificia Universidad Católica (2007) and another at the Universidad Diego Portales (2013), both in Santiago, Chile, and also served as a visiting professor at the Instituto de Arte, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile (2016).

Ana Mendieta (b. 1948, Havana; d. 1985, New York) was a multimedia body artist interested in the relationships among the female body, identity, and nature. At the age of twelve, she fled the Cuban regime of Fidel Castro (1926–2016) as a part of Operation Peter Pan, an exodus of unaccompanied minors to the United States between 1960 and 1962. She emigrated with her sister Raquelín (then aged fifteen), leaving their parents behind in Cuba. After arriving in Dubuque, Iowa, the sisters spent their first two years in the United States shuffling between foster homes and orphanages, eventually being reunited with their mother and brother in 1966, and their father in 1979. Mendieta attended the University of Iowa, where she earned a BA in painting (1969–72), an MA in painting, and an MFA in intermedia (1972–77) in the university’s experimental Multimedia Program directed by Mendieta’s then partner, German-American artist Hans Breder (1935–2017). She moved to New York City in 1978, joining A.I.R. (Artists In Residence) Gallery, the first all-women’s gallery in the United States. In 1980, she returned to Cuba for the first time in eighteen years, and returned several times during the next three years. In 1983, she was awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. She met minimalist artist Carl Andre (b. 1935) at an event at A.I.R. Gallery in 1979, and started a relationship with him, eventually marrying him in 1985. She died tragically in New York City later that year after falling out of the window of the 34th-floor Greenwich Village apartment that she shared with Andre, under suspicious circumstances. Though Andre was tried for her murder in 1988, he was eventually acquitted.

Herzberg was uniquely prepared to write this article on Mendieta’s early artistic trajectory because she wrote her doctoral dissertation on the subject, titled “Ana Mendieta, the Iowa Years: A Critical Study, 1969 through 1977” (1998). Herzberg’s magazine article appeared in ArtNexus, an art magazine based in Bogotá, Colombia, that is considered a foremost periodical of contemporary Latin American art. Curated by Olga Viso, deputy director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the exhibition took place from October 2004 to January 2005. The exhibition and catalogue are considered the most comprehensive overview of Mendieta’s life, career, and direct artistic influences. Among these influences are professor Hans Breder, fellow student Charles Ray, visiting artists and lecturers from New York Scott Burton and Marjorie Strider, theater director Robert Wilson, and art critic Willoughby Sharpe (who all visited in 1970), and the art critics John Perreault and Lucy R. Lippard (who both visited in 1975). [As a complementary reading, see another text by Herzberg on the artist’s early work in the ICAA Digital Archive, “Ana Mendieta: The Formative Years,” ArtNexus (January–March 2003): 54–59 (doc. no. 1343959).]