ANA MENDIETA:
IMPRINTS/STUDENT YEARS 1972-1977

An awareness of an artist’s student years always illuminates our understanding of their subsequent work. This is especially true when trying to understand a career as tragically brief as Ana Mendieta’s.

Ana began graduate studies in painting at the University of Iowa’s School of Art and Art History in 1969. It was an auspicious moment. In 1970, a progressive administration allowed me to establish the first university level Multimedia and Video Art program. A major Rockefeller Foundation Grand helped to establish The Center for the New Performing Arts. It was an exhilarating period during which we pioneered the nurture of the avant-garde arts within a university environment. Many of the most significant conceptual/performance artists of the era spent time in Iowa City—Hans Haake and Alan Kaprow were among the first visitors; Robert Wilson, in residency for a semester in 1970, developed Deafman Glance; Vito Acconci, Willoughly Sharp, Nam June Paik, Mary Beth Edelson, Mac Adams, Lucy Lippard and others had an impact on the art community. It was a remarkably fertile atmosphere.

In this atmosphere, Ana’s work exploded off the canvas. She received her MA degree in painting in 1972 and entered the Multimedia and Video Art program. During the next five years, until she received her MFA degree in 1977, she passionately formulated and pursued her vision—nurtured and influenced by the experimental environment here but also thoroughly moved by her Cuban roots—always attempting to explore and express the powers of the primitive.

I have countless memories of the experience of Ana’s work during this period—work that existed most powerfully in the moment. What we have now is documentation, traces of those moments during which she attempted, in her words, “to become one with the earth.”

I remember when she was first inspired to do a piece which set the stage for the silueta series of the next decade. It is 1972—a sunny, humid afternoon, typical of Iowa in the early fall. A group of my students visit my studio. Among them is Ana Mendieta. The smell of richly cut grass is hanging in the air. Spontaneously, Ana announces that she has idea for a piece. She undresses, lies on the lawn, and asks one of the students to cover her body with grass. Somebody takes photographs. In the photographs her body blends into the ground. From that point, she blended her body with the elements in innumerable ways.

Ana spreads fertilizer in an outline of her body on a freshly cut lawn. In time, the grass in the area that she has fertilized grows stronger and darker.

At Old Man’s Creek in Iowa City, she burns the outline of her body into the ground with gunpowder.

During this time, each summer, I took students to Oaxaca, Mexico. It is one morning in 1973, as we are planning to visit Yaagul, a Zapotec site in the valley of Oaxaca, Ana asks me to drive her first to the market to buy flowers. She tells me she has an idea for a piece. This is a site that we had visited many times. We walk up to one of the open tombs. She lays in it, nude, and asks me to arrange the flowers around her body, instructing me that the flowers should seem to grow from her body.

She has a cohetero (maker of fireworks) in a colonia district of Oaxaca make a firework piece in the shape of the outline of her body. One evening, at dusk, we ignite it and watch her form consumed by fire.

In the fall of 1977 Ana has a branding iron fabricated in the sculpture studio at Iowa—a duplicate of her hand. She asks me to trace the outline of her body on the lawn in the back of my house. Then she heats the branding iron on my gas burner and burns imprints of her hand into the drawn outline.

My final image of Ana from this particular chapter of her life is later that fall in 1977. She is leaving for New York City to begin life in the art world there—climbing aboard a Greyhound bus with her branding iron under her arm.

She has left her mark.

Hans Breder - Iowa City, June 1987