Untitled

Mendieta arrived in 1961 via Operation Peter Pan, a program that relocated children from Cuba to the U.S., and was educated at the University of Iowa. Over the course of a tragically brief career, she was best known for her “earth-body” sculptures and the films and photographs that captured or complemented them. Her work was a potent combination of feminism, performance, and activism. Often based on her naked body, it is radical, bold, powerful, and laden with metaphor, symbolism, and an earthy politics. Untitled is from Mendieta’s last series, five burn-marked totemic slabs drawn with homemade gunpowder that was set on fire. The forms are perhaps connected to her interest in Afro-Caribbean Santeria, Catholicism, and Aztec ritual. Intensely corporeal, the work is also laced with mystery. As she wrote, “My art is grounded in the belief of one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant from plant to galaxy.”