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#and also ana mendieta's work!!
saw-facts · 5 months
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your post inspired me so here's who I think certain saw characters favorite artists would be with no explanation at all:
hoffman: george bellows
amanda: paul cezanne
john: osman hamdi bey
lawrence: allan kaprow
adam: marta minujin
lynn: doris salcedo
strahm: caravaggio
oh i like this!! i want to add some:
the eerie quality of henri de toulouse-lautrec's work (at least imo) feels like it'd be appealing to hoffman. along the same vein, i'd say edvard munch too. ALSO FRANCISCO GOYA. im surprised he wasn’t also painting fucked up shit on his own walls.
amanda would love louise bourgeois, ana mendieta, joan mitchell, and eva hesse. i feel like she'd also be really into fiber arts in general (tamara kostianovsky, kiki smith, raija jokinen). also we know she likes some renaissance/stylistically classical art bc she has the birth of venus print next to her bed in saw 3! i think this is more for gay reasons but i bet she'd like john william waterhouse’s mythological paintings.
i love this one for john! the obvious one for him would be da vinci as well- john's drawings actually remind me a lot of his. i think he wouldn't be into abstraction because “it lacks intellect” or some shit. probably dark, dramatic, pensive baroque art.
i feel like lawrence would be into impressionism but NOT post impressionism!!! he'd be so annoying about it. monet, degas, cassat, etc. i also think he'd enjoy botanical illustrations. probably a fan of edward hopper too.
adam would like jc leyendecker. just based on vibes. others i think he'd enjoy include john singer sargent, norman lewis, lee krasner, yoshitaka amano, salman toor, yayoi kusama... these are all over the place uhhhh i just think he'd enjoy a wide range of styles. now ofc he has favorite photographers, but that is not at all my area of study and the only one i could think of off the top of my head that would fit him is robert mapplethorpe.
for lynn, andrew wyeth makes sense to me- the lonely, empty, desolate feeling his paintings give you would probably speak to her :( agnes martin (ESPECIALLY agnes martin) and louise nevelson would probably appeal to her too.
strahm liking caravaggio is basically canon to me. like of fucking course. for one, he'd just loooove telling people that the Old Master painters are the finest of fine artists just bc he's a dick (and doesn't know shit about art made after like the 18th century). but also caravaggio was gay and killed someone and was murdered so. it fits. he'd probably scoff at rene magritte paintings but deep down he'd really enjoy them.
im obsessed with this ask and i've been drafting this response for a hot minute bc i wanted to put some real thought into it. VERY fun and a great way to procrastinate on work as an art history grad student
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thoughtportal · 4 months
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In this episode, we talk about the power of storytelling, the importance of writing women's lives into history and fighting for their rights. Shafak has said: "...as a young Turkish student, it occurred to me that the history that was taught to me top down could be seen in different ways depending on who is telling the stories..."
We speak about Artemisia Gentileschi to Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta to Georgia O'Keeffe; Shafak's upbringing and the importance of multitudinous narratives, and the power of images when it comes to writing novels.
We explore the similarities between a painting and a novel; how storytelling can be transmitted through so many different artforms, from word of mouth or the written word. As a novelist, Shafak spends so much time dreaming up worlds, and, in a way, this is not that dissimilar from an artist.
But we also talk about the importance of emotion, and how stories can give us that, as Shafak has said: “Why is it that we underestimate feelings and perceptions? I think it’s going to be one of our biggest intellectual challenges, because our political systems are replete with emotions … and yet within the academic and among the intelligentsia, we are yet to take emotions seriously…”
Shafak is the author of 19 books, which have been translated into 57 languages. A shortlister for the Booker Prize and Women's Prize for Fiction, she holds a PhD in political science and she has taught at universities in Turkey, the US and the UK.
A Fellow and a Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature, Shafak is also instrumental in her work as an advocate for women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights and freedom of expression. A twice TED Global speaker, Shafak contributes to publications around the world, such as the Guardian with her poignant articles on women’s rights in Turkey.
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longlistshort · 11 months
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Andrew Edlin Gallery is currently showing a collection of rarely seen works by artist Beverly Buchanan. It covers her years as an abstract expressionist painter in NYC and her later work inspired by the rural South.
The gallery’s press release gives a really good history of this wonderful artist-
The first section of the show features the artist’s abstract paintings and works on paper from the 1970s, alongside post-minimalist sculpture from the late 1970s and early 1980s. The second section introduces a later, more personal side of Buchanan’s oeuvre, her colorful depictions of flowers and small folk-inspired assemblages created during the same period as her well-known “shacks.” A number of the works in the show, many of which were part of the artist’s private collection, have never been shown.
Though Buchanan wrote about her love of “making things” from an early age, it wasn’t until 1971, when she began taking evening classes taught by African-American painter Norman Lewis (1909-1979) at the Art Students League in New York, that her career as an artist took off. Abstract still-lifes that she made in Lewis’s class in 1972 are displayed here for the first time. That same year, her paintings were included in a group show at Cinque Gallery, a nonprofit space co-founded by Lewis and Romare Bearden (1911-1988), which showcased the art of emerging minority artists.
Having witnessed demolition sites in Harlem and SoHo, Buchanan evoked the visual erosion of architectural facades through what she dubbed her “Wall” paintings. In 1976 she presented a selection that she called “Torn Walls” in a two-person show titled City Walls at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey. In his New York Times review, David Shirey described the show as “indisputably a tinderbox of a display that will cause sparks to fly” and “the kind …one sees more regularly at the Whitney Museum and at some of New York’s avantgarde galleries.” Three of these paintings are being shown for the first time since that exhibition, forty-seven years ago. The show also includes a monotype, small studies, and a large painting from a series she titled “Black Walls.” The latter was originally featured in Shackworks, a seminal exhibition that opened at the Montclair Art Museum in 1994 and traveled to nine other institutions from 1994-1996.
By the late 1970s, Buchanan was further exploring the aesthetics of architectural decay through sculpture, i.e., cast concrete assemblages, made from pieces of stone, brick debris, clay, and cement mixtures. She arranged these works in clusters on the floor, documenting them with photographs, and exhibited them, notably at Truman Gallery in New York in 1978, and at the feminist artist cooperative A.I.R. Gallery in 1980 in its groundbreaking show Dialectics of Isolation, curated by Ana Mendieta. Some of the small black terracotta works on display may be considered as studies for these larger assemblages.
After moving to Georgia in 1977, Buchanan became increasingly interested in making what she referred to as “environmental sculpture,” artworks that mimicked exterior surfaces and were also site-specific installations that were allowed to decay over time and become part of the surroundings. Most notably, in 1979 she completed Ruins and Rituals (also the title of the Brooklyn Museum retrospective from 2016-2017), and in 1980 Marsh Ruins, with funding from a Guggenheim Fellowship. To construct the three mounds that comprise Marsh Ruins, Buchanan produced her own tabby cement. Composed of the lime from burned oyster shells mixed with sand, water, ash, and other shells, tabby is what colonial settlers used to build structures in coastal Georgia, the location of Marsh Ruins. In her zine “Making Tabby for Brick Sculptures,” Buchanan documented the labor-intensive process of making tabby, a task that in the eighteenth century was typically delegated to enslaved workers. Two smaller iterations of these structures, with bits of oyster shell showing in the concrete, are laid out in the show alongside four other examples of her cast concrete assemblages. Though little is known about their exhibition history, we do know that the artist placed these cast concrete works in her garden in Athens, Georgia. They retain stripes of the green, blue, black and earth-toned paint with which Buchanan initially covered them. The faint outline of her signature “B.B.” is also visible.
Buchanan’s later work is intimately linked to her natural surroundings and folk art. As a native Southerner, she drew on memories from her childhood as well as the lush Georgian landscape and yard art of local self-taught artists. A passionate gardener, Buchanan produced vivid oil pastel flower drawings and small assemblage works. She loved to rummage through thrift stores collecting marbles, wedding toppers, and beads, to create what she referred to as her “Christmas trees,” and “spirit jars,” her take on memory jugs, a prized Southern Folk Art form. Buchanan was particularly moved by a visit to folk artist Nellie Mae Rowe’s home in Fayette County, Georgia, and reminisced: “Being at Nellie Mae Rowe’s home was like being engulfed in a magic forest of her work because every surface had a mark from her hand and the simple chewing gum works made you never take gum as just chewing gum again.” A distinctive chewing gum jug and pin are also included in the show.
This exhibition closes 5/13/23.
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k00281262 · 1 year
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Home
This afternoon, I was very tired, so I decided to take it easy in terms of artwork and instead do some artist research.
As I lean more into the theme of home, and exploring what that means for me, I am looking more at artists that focus on home, domesticity, and what that means for them.
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"Jean and Table Top (Girl in Yellow Jumper)", John Bratby, 1953-1954
Bratby was a part of the Kitchen Sink Painters, a group of four painters active in the 1950s whose work was concerned with ordinary lives of ordinary people (often with socio-political undertones)
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"Early Portrait of John Bratby", Jean Cooke, 1954
Cooke was married to Bratby, and the feminist in me can't help but notice the contrast in their depictions of domesticity. Where his work feels constructed and masculine, hers feels much more at ease.
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"Kitchen", Liza Lou, 1991-1996
Lou's installation is made entirely out of glass beads, and its laborious process of creation is a commentary on unsung domestic labour. If women belong in the kitchen, we might as well make the kitchen look pretty.
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"Femme Maison", Louise Bourgeois, 1945-1947
Though she's best known for her spiders, Louise Bourgeois was also known to use architectural imagery as a symbol of both security and entrapment.
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"My Bed", Tracey Emin, 1999
I really could have chosen any of Emin's pieces here- the raw intimacy of her work invites us into her world and gives us a glimpse into her inner world. For a while, this bed was her home.
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"The Dream (The Bed)", Frida Kahlo, 1940
Speaking of beds! Kahlo was bed-bound for much of her adult life due to a tram accident she suffered as a young woman. This painting depicts the bed as a liminal space between life and death. As someone who has often been bed-bound myself due to ongoing illness, her work really speaks to me.
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"Silueta Works in Mexico", Ana Mendieta, 1973-1977
What does "home" mean? Mendieta's work was often inspired by her displacement from her native Colombia at a young age. She explores the connection between body and earth.
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Untitled, Doris Salcedo, 2003
This piece isn't strictly about the theme of home but it's one of my all-time favourite pieces and I felt a need to include it. Much of Salcedo's work focuses on the feeling of displacement, using domestic items as symbols for people. Here, people displaced due to war are represented by humble kitchen chairs.
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leyfin · 11 months
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i dont think I have words to express how I feel about ana medietas work and also her own history like how viscerally she captured these ephemeral fleeting ideas about the self and the body and death and metamorphosis. but then also in the morbid attachment you get to the memory of a murdered woman gone too soon km sorry I'm being parasocial abt u miss mendieta
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k00288816 · 1 year
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An homage to Ana Mendieta | Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints), Face, 1972.
In her documented performance, Mendieta pressed a piece of glass against her face and different areas of her naked body to complete a series of thirty-six slides. The works are among Mendieta’s earliest experiments with body art and affirm control as much as they bemoan the violent pressure and resulting discomfort the protagonist inflicted upon herself. In her strikingly modern reinterpretation of the grotesque, Mendieta embraced the disquieting force of deformity as a commentary against the societal biases she had experienced as a Cuban American female artist.
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It can be interesting to think about how Mendieta's artwork challenges our ideas about the body and how we see ourselves. It can also be a way to think about how we express ourselves through art and how we can use art to explore our own identities and the world around us.
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abwwia · 1 year
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Where is Ana Mandieta?
¿Donde esta Ana Mendieta? ... #STOPWARONWOMEN
... "I went to art school with Ana and I completely believe what Carl Andre said, that she jumped out the window in a fit of anger at him. Consider it her final performance. If you really want a target for righteous anger, you might consider her art school professor who would technically now be considered a rapist by assertion of his position of authority. Ironically, he was grading her on rape performance artworks."
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/carl-broke-something-on-carl-andre-ana-mendieta-and-the-cult-of-the-male-genius
Let’s briefly unpack the contempt and misogyny and professional jealousy of this anonymous commenter. He wants so desperately to believe it is more likely that Mendieta threw herself, her talent, her imagination, her burgeoning career, out of a window in a fit of pique rather than being pushed by her drunk husband in the middle of a violent fight. He wants to believe that anyone angered by her death is simply looking for a target for righteous indignation over sexism. He tells us to get hysterical over something else — that her teacher, the first person to document her work and support her talent, was also her lover. He equates her death with her sex life, her death with her performances, her death with her art — and reduces women’s agony over this life to feminist hysteria.
learn more about the Artist:
https://palianshow.wordpress.com/2022/11/18/ana-mendieta/
https://palianshow.wordpress.com/2021/11/17/ana-mendieta-would-be-73yo-today/
#palianshow #womensart #artbywomen #artherstory #anamendieta
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ianvoerman · 1 year
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Ana Mendieta - Silueta series (1974)
Mendieta was a Cuban/American performance and video artist. Besides working with these two mediums she was also a sculptor and painter. She is mostly known for her "earth-body" artworks. She died in 1985.
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gentledread · 2 years
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ana mendieta’s work is very inspiring but I’m not a big fan of artists who imitate her work too closely… like first of all it was a Moment when she did it and that doesn’t need to be replicated, also erases the personal connection to the diaspora experience lol
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suzylwade · 2 years
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Ana Mendieta "My art is grounded on the belief in one universal energy which runs though everything. From insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy.” - Ana Mendieta, Artist. In the summer of 1971, Cuban born artist Ana Mendieta travelled to Mexico for research, describing the experience as "like going back to the source, being able to get some magic just by being there." Her vision - of a unified art of the self, drawing on nature and place as well as performance and sculpture - was being formed. Its first manifestation was also one of the rawest: a series of visceral performances created in response to the 1973 rape and murder of a university student, Sara Ann Otten. By 1974, Mendieta was working on a series of performances that used blood as the primary material. In ‘Body Tracks’ Mendieta dips her hands and forearms in blood then smears them down a wall. Everything she did was documented on film or photographs - often by the artist and academic Hans Breder - whom Mendieta has a decade-long affair when she began making art at the ‘University of Iowa’. In the summer of 1975, having returned to Mexico, she created the first of her ‘Siluetas’ series in which she left an imprint of her body in the ground. Her silhouette pieces became a kind of signature and were often executed in stones, leaves and twigs, flowers and driftwood, and sometimes set on fire, outlined by fireworks or drenched with red paint. Mendieta arrived in New York in 1978. She found a tiny apartment on Sullivan Street and eventually made friends with some of the leading feminist artists of the time - Nancy Spero, Mary Beth Edelson and Carolee Schneemann. When Edelson organised a fancy-dress party for Louise Bourgeois - Mendieta went as Frida Kahlo. https://www.instagram.com/p/CdIclQ0Mxv0/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
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kayahforde-cs · 5 days
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A large portion of my graphic media work surrounding women finding their inner peace (and mainly finding this ‘inner peace’ in the forest) can be linked to the concept of Ecofeminism. According to Mies and Shiva (1993), the term ‘Ecofeminism’ was coined by Francoise D’Eaubonne. However, it truly grew out of many social movements, and became popular ‘in the context of numerous protests and activities against environmental destruction’ (13). Ecofeminism is a women-identified movement, as we can see the destruction of the earth before our very eyes, and through the general female experience, we can see a clear link between women’s patriarchal oppression, and the oppression of nature and her beings (throughout this book, nature and the earth is referred to as having she/her pronouns).
For my project, I had many references to goddesses of nature in mind, the major one being ‘Gaia’. Merchant (1996) quotes Spretnak (1975) that ‘Gaia is the ancient earth-mother who brought forth the world and the human race from ‘the gaping void, Chaos.’’ (3). In my graphic media project, I have created a forest spirit who is the catalyst in giving my main character a spark that enables her to find fulfilment in herself. I referenced many depictions of Gaia when I created her. Furthermore, Merchant mentions how Spretnak’s aim through her book Lost Goddesses of Early Greece was to reclaim Gaia as a mother nature figure, which was also widely attempted amongst feminists, especially in the 1970s (3). According to these feminists and what they wrote about Gaia, she is the earth. She is the land we walk and breathe on. She is the sole creator and protector of the land, and it is she who brought life to this world. Such a powerful image evoked when thinking about this ultimately removes any sort of patriarchy or oppressive powers enforced on women out of the picture. What we are left with is a wide landscape painting of a green world that is run by women for women. Although this is an extremely radical take on what ecofeminism aims to achieve, I think that this idyllic world is one that enables women to have a peace of mind, almost an escape away from the damaging patriarchal culture they are forced to live in.
Not only does Ecofeminism give women some sort of control over the earth and prevent its destruction, but it also gives women some autonomy over their bodies and their reproductive choices. Shiva (1993) draws upon the link between the reduction of human reproduction, as well as the reduction of plant reproduction. Women are not seen as the ‘raw source’ of reproduction, but rather their wombs are regarded as ‘containers’ and their natural and organic relationship with the foetus is ‘replaced by knowledge mediated by men and machines which claims the monopoly of expertise to educate women to be good mothers’ (27). By comparison, industrially developed fertilisers are used to control nature’s limits to how much they can healthily reproduce and grow. This has created diseased soils, and salinised wastelands. Furthermore, hybridisation has enabled corporations to capitalise off of plant breeding (29). Plants cannot speak or react, leaving them to comply with this damaging control placed upon them. Therefore, the ecofeminist movement, which gives women the power to protect the earth from being capitalised off of, also gives women the chance to protect their own reproductive systems, away from medical books and knowledge used to speak over their own natural bonds with the child they have developed in their own bodies.
This leads me onto discussing the work of Ana Mendieta, who is considered to be a ‘martyr of female victimisation under patriarchy’ (Tepfer, 2002: 236), as well as a performance artist working during the 1970s feminist movement. According to Viso (2004), Mendieta had a fascination for ancient civilisations and cultures, and these often ran in conjunction with early feminist theories that ‘encouraged a rediscovery of the “goddess archetype”’ to empower women (45). Although I have briefly mentioned her in my earlier blog posts surrounding women and spirituality, I am looking at her work in more detail with an Ecofeminist stance.
Mendieta’s artwork is ‘grounded on the belief in one universal energy that runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy’ (Jones quoted in Viso, 2004: 56). Indeed, Mendieta’s Silueta series reinforces this belief by moulding herself into the earth and becoming one with the earth, which enabled her to have a ‘ritualistic relationship [with] the land’ (Brough, 2020). She considered her siluetas to be ‘self-portraits’, which I believe is very interesting in that she seems to have considered herself to be the soil, the plants, and the trees, with the way she has moulded, burned and buried the silhouette of her body into the land. She used organic materials such as blood, twigs and flowers - her constant use of natural resources in her artwork can be said to be a ‘reference to the cycles of life and the regenerative powers of nature and humanity’ (Viso, 2004: 52). However, Dango (2022) points out that Mendieta’s Siluetas do not celebrate women’s intrinsic connection with nature, but rather criticise the ‘alignment of environmental and seuxalised forms of domination.’ Certainly, I agree with this viewpoint as not only does Mendieta use scenes of nature to reinforce her beliefs, but she also uses scenes of her apartment to emphasise the rape of the woman, and thus, the ’Rape of the Earth.’ Fig. 1 shows the artist with her back facing the camera, her bloodied hands (dipped in tempera to mimic the look of blood) against the wall as she looks up at them. By comparison, Fig. 2 depicts a mould of a body in the sand, the bottom of the figure dyed red, depicting the image of blood. These two disturbing images emphasise how the rape of a woman is synonymous with the harsh treatment of the earth, which puts into clear perspective why the ecofeminist movement is a widespread movement, and why women in particular are so passionate about the topic.
Another artwork of Mendieta’s that I personally find fascinating and runs in conjunction with my graphic media project is Arbol de la Vida, or Tree of Life (see fig. 3). Here, we can see Mendieta’s body being covered in mud and foliage, with her arms slightly raised up while her body is pressed against a tree. Undoubtedly, Mendieta is portraying the relationship with the female and her connection to nature. Furthermore, the title of this photograph, Arbol de la Vida, is interesting as the Mayan and Mesoamerican beliefs state that the top of the Tree of Life reaches the heavens, while its roots reach into the underworld (Jones, 2023: 55). The tree represents the interconnectedness between all factions of the Earth, and that everything, everywhere, is connected. In my graphic media animation, the main character becomes one with the forest at the end, leaving her urban life behind and instead leading a life in the forest, where she feels fulfilled, and where she is meant to be.
Bibliography
Brough, J (2020) This Artwork Changed My Life: Ana Mendieta’s “Silueta” Series. Available at: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-artwork-changed-life-ana-mendietas-silueta-series (Accessed: 8 March 2024).
Dango, M. (2022) ‘Rape of the Earth: Ana Mendieta’s Defense of a Metaphor’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 48(1).
Jones, J. (2023) ‘Earth-Bodies as Re-Exsistence: Ana Mendieta’s Siluetas Beyond the Limits of Ecofeminism’, Feminist Formations, 34(3), pp. 34-56.
Merchant, C. (1996) Earthcare: Women and the Environment. New York: Routledge.
Mies, M. and Shiva, V. (1993) Ecofeminism. Australia: Spinifex Press.
Tepfer, E. (2002) ‘The presence of absence: Beyond the ‘great goddess’ in Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series’, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 12(2), pp. 236.
Viso, O.M., et al (2004) Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972-1985. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution in association with Hatje Cantz.
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1dontwannagoback · 23 days
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Ana Mendieta was so real when she made beautiful work that will always in some way be associated with or precipitated by the man who killed her but she is also so much more than that but also her entire existence and art practice is connected to the violence of men and the undoing of that because our entire existence as women is connected to the violence of men and undoing that. This is the crux of a paper I’m writing for class and I’m just putting it here to remind myself to go work on the paper
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204milkbarcbr · 29 days
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I'm usually underwhelmed going to the national gallery tbh, but this latest collection of displayed works? They kinda ate I fear. Especially the top floor/Australian art.
Like I'm gagged and it's so relevant to this project.
They also had an Ana Mendieta video rolling?? And a Kara Walker!? Ok!
Just a few faves:
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Artist Research - Ana Mendieta
My Favourite Works:
University works:
Her early works deal with the theme of violence against women, as Mendieta evokes the suffering of the female body.
Untitled (glass on body imprints - face) 
Mendieta presses her face forcefully against a pane of glass at differing angles. Beyond demonstrating her bodily distress, the distortion of her face across the various images disturbs the work’s function as a portrait. In other words, Mendieta’s photographs of her face do not cohere as representative of herself, thereby disrupting how others view her and draw conclusions about her identity. She made this piece in college.
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Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Variations)
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Rape scene/ Rape-Murder (1973) 
this was one of her first ever performances. She created this piece after one of her fellow students at Lowa University, Sara Ann Otten, was found brutally raped and murdered. She used this piece to bring attention to the sexual violence women are subjected to. 
Ana invited other students from her MFA program to her apartment, where she had left her door purposely ajar, viewers could easier pear into the dramatically lit space to see Mendieta bent over her kitchen table. Upon entering the space, her apartment was in disarray, as if it was the location of a violent sexual assault. The dimly lit space, created a closed composition directing the audience to the central core focal point of the performance, Mendieta’s body, which was striped from the waist down, bent over and tied to a table. All visible parts of the artist’s body were smeared in animal blood, dripping from her buttock to her calves, and pooling in a puddle at her feet. 
The addition of blood would become a dominant element of Mendieta’s art practices in which its inclusion offered multiple meanings. In this context, not only did the substance allude to a violent act, but also was in reference to Mendieta’s personal interest in the religious rituals of the Afro-Cuban practice of Santeria. Santeria attributes blood to Goddess Ochun who symbolized female sexuality, power and spiritual life force. Ana believed blood was not negative, but empowering, and aligned herself with Goddess Ochun to present the female subject as in control of her own representation.
Body Tracks 
In this film Mendieta makes track-like marks, trails of blood that drag from her forearms, drawing a downward movement like bloodshed which, when it ends, leaves the viewer staring at the remains of the action, transformed into performative text. An integral part of the performance, the motion turned Mendieta’s body into a living paint brush that gave the artist complete control of the composition while restoring her agency as a ‘third world woman.’ 
In this way, Ana’s body became a site of resistance to subvert the gendered colonial structures embedded in society.  The use of blood, again attributed to Santeria religious practices, symbolically refilled her identity with the elemental fluid, which carries sacred power and life force, asking the question, what is the real substance of identity? But also in relation to grief over the lose of her homeland, symbolized by the shedding of blood. 
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Silueta Series (1973-1980)
My favourite series. Mendieta staged performances where she laid down in natural landscapes or covered her body in organic materials and then documented the resulting imprints or silhouettes. The silhouettes themselves were temporary and due to the nature of how they are made, also meant they were accessible to the public without having to pay to see it. 
These performances recall Mendieta’s experience as an exile who was separated from her homeland at a young age. In her Silueta performances she marked the land, leaving the trace of her absent body. This trace perhaps serves as a metaphor for her absence from her birthplace; she was unable to return to Cuba until the 1980s.
Ties into her incorporation of a goddess figure.
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Ochun (1981)
Ochún meditates on Mendieta’s experiences as an immigrant. The video features a Silueta sculpted from earth off the coast of Key Biscayne, on Florida’s southern tip. Water, which dominates the video’s views and soundtrack, is presented as a uniting element that connects both places, evoking the artist’s hope to capture “the transition between my homeland and my new home . . . reclaiming my roots and becoming one with nature.”
We see the waves wash over the imprint of her body as it slowly carries parts of it with each ebb and flow. The idea is that the waves are picking up pieces of her off the US shores and carrying her back home.
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Labyrinth of Venus series 
Until feminist scholars began documenting the nuanced ways colonial conquest sanctioned sexual violence against non-white indigenous women at a rate higher than that of white western women, historians rarely conceptualised how gender and sexual violence were intrinsic to all aspects of Colonialism. The work of Cuban artist, Ana Mendieta provides insight to the complex relationship. Her work explored her relationship with gendered colonialism and institutionalised ‘gendered racism endured by women of color that dehumanises them by denying them gender. For Mendieta, this came in the form of discrimination based on her Cuban identity and experiences of sexual violence against women. the artist’s experience with colonial sexual domination and discrimination in the United States culminated in her use of the female form to theorise third-wave feminist post-colonial issues pertaining to gendered racism directed at ‘third world women,’ a term used by Mendieta in 1980 to address white global feminism’s avoidance of fights of non-white women at her curated show, ‘Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists in the United States’ at A.I.R. Gallery, New York 
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k00292709 · 2 months
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ARTIST RESEARCH
Ana Mendieta, Cuban sculptor and painter. 1948-85
“My art is grounded on the belief in one universal energy which runs through all being and matter, all space and time.”
Although many of Mendieta's works concern her experience as an exile who was separated from her homeland at a young age, I found her studies of the body captivating; specifically, the female body.
Her sculpture pieces pictured above are created using her own body as a medium and I think that alone is an interesting concept in relation to my project. Periods are very personal and form a part of our identity.
I also think her use of vivid red pigments is very apt.
Ref: moma.org
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commildiabos · 2 months
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I am thrilled to be here, and I want to remind Richard [Move] that I think his film is extraordinary [BloodWork: The Ana Mendieta Story, 2009]. It is a true and deep homage as it clarifies so many dense sources that Ana opened and then tangled again for all of us. 
Facing cultural resistance was something that she and I constantly could discuss once we became friends. I am just going to share some associative connections between the remarkable coincidence and correspondences of our physical actions – because they really have to do with urgent permissions to regard the sensory, psychic realm in which the body manifests its own energy against constrictions and prohibitions. There is usually a 5- or 10-year difference between the images which I will share of our related works.
My influences began with the psychic phenomena of a Scottish nanny; it was she who taught me to pray to the moon and to inhabit the body that belonged with sheep and trees and rivers; and of course it was secret, my family was never to know. We had a pact – I was probably four or five years old, my family must never know what she showed me at midnight looking out the window. These forms of what, for me, would have been described as pantheism, reify themselves when I see the work of Ana, and when we finally meet each other in the mid-70s – when we’ve already produced this relay of connected work. The struggle has to do with the confines of essentialist theory, which was a way of constraining and marginalizing our fuller historic implications. Both of us were committed to the saturation of material, in that the body moves and is sustained by saturation within the extensivity of our sensory energy.
We are both researching, by the mid-70s, Maria Gimbutas, so that the Paleolithic as well as the Yoruba aspect of the inhabited body, the sacral body, are active – coincidentally, and these are very interesting coincidences. So for both of us, it seems there is a phylogeny that recapitulates mythology. It is the sense that there are certain energies and momentums that will be opened and coincidentally discovered and explored: so here’s the explicit body taking the deeper roots of genital sexuality into the recognition of forms of nature, and how we would interact and inhabit those forms of nature. In my notes I say that we have forgotten the danger, the dangers of depicting the explicit sensuous female body, we have forgotten how much hatred and resistance that inspired – rage, envy, domination. The use of the body was truly live and declared narcissistic. In the use of our bodies we shared the confluence of being despised in the art world throughout our early experiments, as mine from the 60s were hugely resisted and then Ana enters the force field of feminist issues in the 70s where feminist theory and research begins to tear down the determinations of narcissism, exhibitionism, but what enters in the field at that moment is the abject and the essentialist! In order to recognize that we were facing a new construct of deflections, that if the identification of the vital energies with nature and the body can only be ‘‘essentialist or abject,’’ we are still going to be denied full aesthetic authority.
In the 1960s any deeper eroticization had been profoundly suppressed: there is no female pronoun used for women until the mid-70s – hard to remember! There was no vocabulary for female genital sexuality. And Ana and I used to ask each other, why has the history of the chastity belt – the chador; clitoridectomy; nunnery; silencing the female – endured? How very lucky we were to exist barely escaping these punishments. We said that the violence against women relates to the whole patriarchal sense of violence against the natural world, and the resistance to gendered integrations, and of course Judeo-Christian traditions had prescribed the denial of sexuality as a source of wisdom and knowledge and the silencing of women’s experience.
I also meant to mention the influence of Maya Deren on both of us. I was very lucky when I first came to New York City in the 1960s to meet her through Stan Brakhage, to visit her place on Morton street and to recognize the very contrary configurations that young artists could go and study, as acolytes to distinguished influential artists; but since she was a woman I saw that the guys, the young guys, expected her to feed us, to give us whiskey and cigarettes – even though she didn’t have enough funds at the time to print her Haitian footage! We were very privileged to have her run the original film through her projector. We faced a very desperate configuration against the authority of women artists, and especially a sexualized vision; and then it begins to break down, it is always breaking down.
In our friendships we like to party, we like to drink. It was very important for Ana that when I came to her house, being tall, I could change her light bulbs.
With her death, it became significant that Ana did not like to even stand on a chair. She could throw herself in the water and onto branches and bury herself in dirt, but she had vertigo. In the mid-70s I’m enduring mud pieces where I’m drying myself in puddles; it’s an ordeal work, it takes forever, and then there’s the silueta of Ana at the same time. We felt a profound affinity; a deep sisterhood as well as we did with Mary Beth Edelson. There was this sisterhood and it was dynamic and helped us do the work. And what has changed is that we’re all here thinking about the power of the work, the sustainable beauty, the incredible presence, how inhabited it is, that it escapes any of the delimitating definitions that surrounded it earlier on. The dream that Ana sent me – which is so well described in Richard’s film, and described by my incredible disbelief when the guys building the shelves in my loft come in and say, ‘‘Gee, look at the newspaper, ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Carl Andre’s wife is dead!’’ – the dream she sent me was to go out into the snow and make forms with my body. I ran out in a nightgown and made images just with my hands in the snow and then I realized I wanted to stabilize it, to sustain it, so I gathered blood and ashes and what else, maybe there was red paint. The local IGA grocery in the country where I live was very suspicious when I wanted pints of blood; it was for Spanish sausage, I explained! So that’s the homage and as some of you know if you’ve read Naked by the Window, Ana sent quite a few artists dream instructions so this was not a unique manifestation. There’s another realm from our beyond that produced homage to Ana.
Thank you everybody.
Carolee Schneemann, Regarding Ana Mendieta, 2011. Transcribed by Raegan Truax-O’Gorman. From Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 21, no. 2 (July 2011): 183–190. ↘︎ https://www.schneemannfoundation.org/writing/regarding-ana-mendieta
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