The Deathly Siluetas of Ana Mendieta

Highly prolific during her short life, Cuban artist, Ana Mendieta left behind an extraordinary body of work including her beautiful Siluetas – a series of earth-body sculptures where she imprinted or outlined her silhouette into or onto the natural elements. Hauntingly foreboding in their gesture, these works recall sites of mourning and the tracings of a body long after its death. Mendieta’s name is unfamiliar to most people, and until recently, her work has lurked in the shadows of a white male-dominated art world and her mysterious death.

In 1985, Mendieta married Carl Andre, a minimalist sculptor and one of the darlings of the New York art scene. Well-known for their public quarrels while intoxicated, the couple’s relationship remained contentious until its tragic conclusion eight months later. In the early hours of September 8, 1985, Mendieta somehow “went out the window” of their 34th-floor Greenwich Village apartment wearing only her underwear. There were no eyewitnesses. A door attendant in the street below heard a woman screaming “No, no, no, no,” then the explosive thud of her body as it landed on the roof of the Delion delicatessen.

When officers arrived at the scene, the bedroom from which she plunged was in disarray, and Andre had fresh scratches on his nose and forearms. His story to the police differed from his recorded statements during the 911 call hours earlier. He was recorded as saying, “What happened was we had…my wife is an artist…and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, uh, exposed to the public than she was, and she went to the bedroom and I went after her and she went out the window.” However, Andre later told police that he and his wife had been watching television before she went to bed alone. Upon going to bed later, he found her gone and the bedroom window open.

Artist and close friend, Ted Victoria, disputes the notion that she would have either committed suicide or risked standing so near an open window. Another close friend, artist Carolee Schneeman, has asserted that she is convinced that Andre murdered Mendieta. “She made me change her light bulbs. She was afraid of heights. She would never go near the window.”

Mendieta weighed only 93 pounds in contrast to Andre at 175. She also stood less than 5 feet tall and it was difficult for police officers to reconcile how she could have accidently fallen out of a very high window. Andre’s lawyer attributed her death to a possible accident or suicide, however, neither of the scenarios added up, which is likely the reason the police sought murder charges, and why many of her friends and colleagues still remain unconvinced of his innocence.

With such contradictory evidence and anecdotal accounts, the cause of Mendieta’s fall remains a matter of conjecture. How could someone with a show about to open at the New Museum (in a twisted irony her exhibition opened a few days prior to Andre’s trial) commit suicide? How could someone who was so afraid of heights get up high enough to accidentally fall out a window?

Those who have curated or were close to Mendieta, believe that her art deserves to be studied and celebrated away from the circumstances of her death. Most disturbingly (although not surprisingly), the defense used the provocative imagery of her work – the violence, ritualistic performances and allusions to death – to argue that this was the proof that Mendieta wrangled with her identity and had an obsession with death. However, artist Dotty Attie, recalls that her close friend had expressed excitement and optimism about the direction of her art, and her new plans were to give up drinking and smoking.  Apparently, because women artists rarely gain recognition until they are old, Mendieta expressed a desire to live long enough to savour this future moment. Yet, mysteriously, this visionary artist, often described as a passionate, ambitious and fiercely independent woman with a survivalist spirit, died at a pivotal arc in her artistic career.

Mendieta was born to a wealthy family in Havana. In 1961, at the age of 13, Ana’s parents sent her and her sister Raquelin away from Cuba to live in the US. The sisters relocated to Iowa, where they shuffled in and out of various government institutions and foster homes. Conditions were harsh, and at times, even abusive. Her experiences during this time were formative to Mendieta’s artistic development, which touched on themes of violence against women, exile, the impermanence of the body and forces of nature. Early in her twenties, she abandoned the more traditional modes of art making, instead using her body as a powerful instrument of expression. She stated that at the time “I realized that my paintings were not real enough for what I want the image to convey and by real I mean I wanted my images to have power, to be magic.”

Andre was finally arrested, and charged with second-degree murder. After a three-year legal struggle, his indictment culminated in a trial by a judge rather than by a jury, a rarity in US murder cases. Much of the evidence, suppressed due to sloppy police and prosecutorial work, ultimately led to Andre’s acquittal in 1988. On the request of his lawyer, the records were permanently sealed. Why? In the eyes of many, the manner in which Mendieta fell to her death has never been settled.  Schneemann views her death “as part of some larger denial of the feminine.” Oddly, Andre, who has rarely spoken about Mendieta’s tragic death since it happened, has continued to live in the same apartment where she plunged to her death along with his fourth wife, artist Melissa Kretschmer, who in the most eerie of twists makes window-based artworks.

The intrigue and mystery surrounding Mendieta’s death deeply polarized the art world between the powerful establishment loyal to Andre and the feminist and Latino art communities. Her death triggered a public outcry and an army of female artists like the infamous Gorilla Girls who began to assert their voices against discrimination and misogyny inside and outside the art world. The story of Ana Mendieta is also the document of a fertile era in Feminist Art of which she became a pivotal figure. However, only recently, has her work received the critical attention it deserves. Despite the inclusion of women and people of color in the intellectual world of academia, the art world remains frozen in the sixties, denying the majority of female artists entry into a closed system.

For his book, Naked by the Window: The Fatal Marriage of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta, Robert Katz conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with both artist’s friends and family members and obtained exclusive access to all of Ana’s private papers, spanning her aristocratic childhood in Cuba to the final days before her death. Among these papers are a diary, love poems, and letters from Carl Andre. One of the most chilling is a poem by Andre:

“The ways of love were

sometimes my revenge when

I was wronged by something

done or said & she stood

naked by the window waiting

to be struck perhaps where

here white breasts were

red…”

What caused Ana Mendiata’s fatal fall will likely always be shrouded in a mystery, and the screaming echo of her protests, “no, no”, may continue to divide the art world as it reverberates within the dark and ritualistic imagery of her remarkable art works.

I would love to read your comments — please write your thoughts in the box below.  Thank you!