Ana Mendieta

In Depth by Ana Mendieta

       Ana Mendieta (American, born Cuba 1948–1985) is an artist whose career can be distinguished in part by her experimentation with a diverse range of artistic media.
       Ana Mendieta used her own body as both subject and media to explore issues of gender and cultural identity. The naked female form inserted in nature became a hallmark of her artistic production as she developed her own self-labeled genre of art, “earth-body art,” which can be described as a hybrid of two 1960s movements: earth art and body art. Her performances, documented with film and photography, often involved interjecting the performing body into nature in order to forge links with an ancestral past and present.