Art as Catharsis: Ana Mendieta and the Resonance of POC Art

Illustration by Gina Ledor

There are exactly 7,077 days between the day Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta died and the day I was born. She died at 35, falling from the 35th floor of an apartment building naked. She would’ve turned 73 this November, one day before a full moon. 

I first read about Ana Mendieta when I was studying art history for a school competition in 2020. I encountered her Siluetas series–– a cross-disciplinary venture of over 200 works that encapsulates the soul of her work: exploring displacement, the impermanence of the body, and identity. Siluetas (silhouettes in Spanish) combines sculpture, film, painting, and performance, all involving Mendieta burying some part of herself into the earth— from covering herself in flowers and blood, to camouflaging her naked body with a spring hill, to smearing her body in blood and laying on a white sheet. She explained the series best in an old archived MET interview where she talked about why she was so drawn to nature in such a venerative context, especially in her early career “Porque no tenía tierra,” she said. “No tenía patria.” — “Because I didn’t have a home. I didn’t have a homeland”. She left Cuba at a young age through Operation Peter Pan, a secret Cold War-time mass exodus of Cuban children to the United States. It was because of the sentiment of feeling uprooted and replanted in a foreign country, without a motherland, that I became entranced by her work. Part of myself has latched onto Ana Mendieta’s art and her words, like her silhouette has imprinted on me as it left the earth.

I’ve always been drawn to female artists who are wolfishly in love with the process of creation and articulate their art in a way that feels like a paroxysm — kinetic, alive, pulsing. Shockingly honest art — based around the self off of the violently restless urge to capture moments and emotions before they vanish — is what I’ve always been drawn to, and Ana Mendieta’s work encapsulates just that. When Ana was young, she was known for being a performer in the sense that she was bold, loud, and open, but not in that she was putting on a facade. One of her earlier films, “Dog”, was a live performance of her covered in fur crawling in the dirt, somewhere in a bustling Mexico street; you can see confused people looking her up and down in the recording. There’s an element of authenticity and rawness to Ana Mendieta’s work; she distilled her entire being and created something so profound that it’s outlived her thirty-six years after her death.

Why I’m drawn to Ana’s work and character has to do with the deep profundity and resonance of art created by people of color. Art serving as a form of cathartic expression— of relinquishing or reconciling with certain pains you can’t ever truly articulate— is fundamental, and the art of people of color does this. Art, at its greatest, humanizes and discomforts, and the art of people of color emboldens our stories, reclaiming the voices the systemically racist systems try to smother. 

Here is a quote from Ana Mendieta that I think summarizes this  in a way far more articulate than I could ever fathom: “My art,” she said, “is the way I reestablish the bonds that tie me to the universe.”