Episode #58: True Crime/Fine Art: The Mysterious Death of Ana Mendieta (and #MeToo) (Season 6, Episode 5)
This season we’re learning that true crime and art history are two genres that have smashed together with some fascinating results. Today’s show: a contemporary art conundrum. Who is responsible for the death of Ana Mendieta?
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Episode Credits
Production and Editing by Kaboonki. Additional editing by Hannah Roberts. Theme music by Alex Davis. Social media assistance by Emily Crockett and Caroline Haller. Additional writing and research by Grace Harlow.
ArtCurious is sponsored by Anchorlight, an interdisciplinary creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle.
Additional music credits
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Recommended Reading
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Links and further resources
Artsy: How Ana Mendieta Became the Focus of a Feminist Movement
Hyperallergic: Protesters Demand “Where Is Ana Mendieta?” in Tate Modern Expansion
The New Yorker: The Materialist
The Guardian: Ana Mendieta: death of an artist foretold in blood
Los Angeles Review of Books: “Carl Broke Something”: On Carl Andre, Ana Mendieta, and the Cult of the Male Genius
Episode Transcript
We live in an age that is truly obsessed with true crime. Much of the culture consumed today in America, at the very least, is about death-- the top podcasts, top movies, the best prestige series-- they are all trading in on this hot trend. I confess that I’m one of those people who gets into this stuff. I was obsessed with Serial. I watched The Jinx with true relish and Making a Murderer with indignation. The People vs. O. J. Simpson was a favorite-- and Sterling K. Brown for-eva. I like a good dose of true crime. I do feel guilty and sometimes pretty gross about it, but I do. And there’s a special kind of thrill I experience when these terrible stories come into contact with my work life-- the art world. Because it turns out that even the rarefied world of art isn’t immune to tragedy and mystery-- I mean, no one or nowhere is, right? So it’s time for us to dig in to tales of true crime and fine art.
Some people think that visual art is dry, boring, lifeless. But the stories behind those paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs are weirder, crazier, or more fun than you can imagine. In season six, we are uncovering the dastardly deeds of several of art history’s famed artists, including their involvement--or participation--in murder most foul. Today’s topic-- was artist and feminist crusader Ana Mendieta murdered by her artist husband? This is the ArtCurious Podcast, exploring the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in Art History. I'm Jennifer Dasal.
Dónde Está Ana Mendieta? Where is Ana Mendieta? This are the questions that are printed on flyers and posters, and are also commonly chanted by protesters outside museums like the Guggenheim in New York, Tate Modern in London, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. All three, plus many others, have previously held high-profile exhibitions featuring the Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. These protests are no rarities-- since 1992, whenever there is a showcase of Andre’s work protesters form their picket lines and voice their outrage. Why do these crowds gather so frequently outside these cultural institutions? The reason is controversial, to say the least-- these protesters believe that Carl Andre is responsible for the death of his wife, the artist Ana Mendieta, something that has never been confirmed but has long been rumored. In recent years, this rumor has transformed Ana into an emblem of the abuse of women at the hands of men-- particularly women of color at the hands of men. And for too long, there’s been a real silence around this particular topic and the art world. When a museum, for example, chooses to showcase Carl Andre’s work, are they condoning this systematic abuse? And what about the lack of representation of women’s suffering within these same hallowed spaces? All of these questions, and more, swirl around the figure of Ana Mendieta.
Ana Mendieta was born in 1948 to upper-middle-class parents in Havana. Her father was an early supporter of Fidel Castro but quickly became disillusioned with the Anti-Catholic sentiment spreading through Cuba and he soon became involved in organizing counter-revolutionary activities. But such actions were dangerous, and he feared for the lives of his children--- so he arranged for Ana, and her older sister Raquelin, to come to America in 1961 through Operation Pedro Pan, a program organized by priests in Miami which allowed approximately 14,000 children to leave Cuba and enter into the US under the protection of the Catholic Church. Ana was twelve years old, and Raquelin was 14.
Soon after arriving in Miami, Ana and Raquelin were sent to a reform school in Iowa, but were then separated for several years, as they were transferred from foster home to foster home and further apart from one another. Ana undoubtedly felt abandoned by her family and likely experienced isolation and homesickness. Thankfully this feeling didn’t last forever-- Ana was able to reunite with her mother and brother only 5 years later, in 1966, but she ended up not seeing her father again until 1979--eighteen years after she left Cuba. As feared, he had been incarcerated for his anti-revolutionary activities and his disloyalty to Castro. He was right to send his daughters away.
Ana’s early experiences of exile and adaptation to a new home provided her with a fierce independence. After being exposed to cross-disciplinary icons like Marcel Duchamp and meeting with contemporary avant-garde artists at the University of Iowa, Mendieta threw herself into art-making and experimentation. Much of what followed alluded to women-- women’s bodies, their connections to nature and the earth, and their manipulation and violence at the hands of men. In 1973, for example, she created several videos, performances, and photographs related to the rape and murder of a fellow student at the University of Iowa, a woman by the name of Sara Ann Otten. In one performance, Mendieta tied herself to a table, naked and covered in blood, for two hours in order to approximate the murder. She used blood as a primary medium in other ways—creating a series called Body Tracks, where she dipped her hands and arms in blood before smearing them down walls. These performances were all documented through film or photography, and are even haunting and startling today.
Around this same time period, Mendieta began one of her most well-known, if not most-well known, series, called Silhueta. This series of photographs present images of Mendieta’s body imprinted into the ground in a range of natural materials-- sand, stones, leaves, mud. In an artist’s statement from the 1980s, she described this series as being, quote “grounded on the belief in one universal energy which runs through everything.” unquote. Through the imprint of her body in the earth, she symbolically becomes part of the earth, reveling closely in humanity’s connection to our planet.
But there was another important aspect of the Silhueta series. Not only did it promote this human/planet connection, but it also revealed the artist’s further interest in continuing her feminist explorations. Some of the Silhueta images are create raw and visceral pieces, with Mendieta using blood, or red paint as a stand-in for blood centered on violence towards women. In one image, she presents herself lying on a blood-spattered rooftop under a bloodied white sheet with a cow’s heart placed on her chest. In another photograph, she lies in an ancient Zapotec grave, again under a blood-covered white sheet. As we can see, for many of Mendieta’s works, blood is an important medium, something she described as a quote “powerful magic thing” unquote, which she used to evoke female sexuality but also symbolizes the horror of sexual violence.
Like many artists, Mendieta felt the pull of a bigger city and a more vibrant artistic community. So after she completed her M.F.A. at the University of Iowa in 1978, she moved to New York City, where she quickly became friends with like-minded prominent feminist artists and began exhibiting her work. In 1979, she presented a solo exhibition of her photographs at A.I.R., Artists In Residence Inc, which was the first all-female gallery to be established in the United States. A big coup for a still rather-young and unknown artist. But this solo show wasn’t just an important moment for the artist, professionally. It was also an important one on a personal level, because it was at this gallery that Mendieta first met Carl Andre. And that’s coming up next, right after this break.
Welcome back to ArtCurious.
In 1979, during the same period that she enjoyed her first solo exhibition at the A.I.R. Gallery in New York City, Ana Mendieta was introduced to an artist who served on a panel discussion titled, interestingly enough, “How has women’s art practices affected male artist social attitudes?” That artist was Carl Andre. Born in 1935 in Quincy, Massachusetts, Carl Andre was 13 years older than Ana Mendieta, and well established, having already become a major name in the world of Minimalist art in the 1960s. By 1970, he had already had a major retrospective exhibition to his name at the Guggenheim in New York. And in this way, and many, many others, Mendieta and Andre couldn’t be more opposite. Whereas Ana was lively, opinionated, and petite; Carl was often described as “intellectual” and “aloof,” whose towering stature was formidable. Carl was methodical and craved routine while Ana seemed to thrive on spontaneity. Truly, this could have been a real-life case of opposites attract, with each individual acting as a counterpoint to the other. But the differences expanded outwards to the professional, too.
Widely regarded as one of the founding members of the Minimalist art movement, Andre was a conceptual artist known for his austere sculptures that use unaltered raw materials like wood, steel, and bricks often laid out directly on the floor. As artist Maya Gurantz satirically stated, Andre creates, quote, “environments by delineating space in elegantly arranged stacks and configurations of industrially fabricated objects. It purposefully does not speak or articulate. It just is.” Unquote. In contrast, Mendieta’s work was wide-ranging, heavily symbolic, and often personal as well as political. Either way, the couple fell madly in love, for better, or for worse, and they careened together towards the 1980s.
Much has been written about the couple’s respective careers as the 1980s dawned. In fact, their career trajectories are yet another example of the couple’s contrasting elements. After a slew of early successes and important retrospectives in the 1970s, demand for Andre’s work fell in the early 1980s and prices dropped accordingly. According to Sean O’Hagan, who wrote an article on Mendieta for The Guardian, Ana would often remind Andre about his souring career—especially when they drank, which was often. Mendieta’s, of course, was gaining real traction for the very first time, and in 1983, she won the prestigious Rome Prize from the much-lauded American Academy in Rome, a huge step in her career. She moved to the Eternal City and immediately fell in love with it, considering it a splendid hybrid of the historical nature of Cuba and the modernity and artistic creativity of New York. Thus, for the last few years of her life, she traveled back and forth between Rome and New York, making both her home and feeling inspired in both locations. But her relationship with Andre wasn’t so peaceful. Friends noted the strain on the couple, something that distance certainly didn’t improve-- and after a while, they chose to separate. But something changed, and the pair reconciled, only to surprise friends and family by doing something even more shocking: in Rome in January 1985, they got married.
The honeymoon period in the marriage of Ana Mendieta and Carl Andre lasted for most of 1985 when they returned full-time to New York after living in Rome for most of the year. And at first, the return home seemed to be a good one, with the two mired in domestic bliss. But the fighting and the drinking so often commented upon by friends and neighbors began again, and a new source of tension mounted: Ana began suspecting that Carl had been having an affair in Berlin, where he often traveled for work. Things grew dire. And then they hit a very final turning point on the morning of September 8, 1985.
It began like a really normal night, even by our standards today. Carl and Ana stayed in for the evening, ordered some Chinese food, drank a bottle of champagne, and watched a movie. But things didn’t end so brightly. At some point in the early morning hours,, Ana Mendieta plummeted from a bedroom window of their 34th floor apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village, crashing horribly onto the roof of the deli next door, According to police accounts, the impact was so extreme that Ana’s head left an imprint on the roof. She was just thirty-six years old.
It’s difficult to know exactly what happened because only two people were present for the actual event: Ana and Carl. With Ana’s death, she was unable to share her own story, to tell if her jump was suicidal or premeditated, or if something more sinister was at hand. Still, Carl Andre definitely had his side of the story. When questioned by the police, Andre, at first, claimed that Ana jumped from the window. In his 911 call, claimed that she jumped in the aftermath of an argument about his art-world status (and her lack of it), all based not on their respective works but on their gender. Unable to deal with this blatant gender bias, Andre watched her leap out of their bedroom window and fall to her death.
The evidence, though, didn’t look so good for Carl Andre. When the police arrived on the scene, they encountered an apartment in complete disarray. There were four empty champagne bottles in the couple’s bedroom-- not a problem, necessarily, but perhaps worrisome considering the couple’s history of drinking and fighting. More troubling was that Andre was discovered with scratch marks on his nose and forearms, usually a sign of a victim fighting in self defense. Had Carl Andre had a physical altercation with his wife? Did he murder her by throwing her violently out of their apartment window?
Certainly Andre’s claim of suicide, which he continued to assert, was called into question immediately, not only by the authorities, but by Ana’s loved ones. Friends and family pointed to another sign of her career’s star-making trajectory: an impending solo exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, one of the most famous spaces for the latest and most cutting-edge works. This was a huge coup. Ana wouldn’t have killed herself when her career was at an all-time high. And not only that: but Ana was scared of heights, they said. Suicide by jumping from 34 stories seemed very unlikely, even if she was indeed suicidal. It just didn’t make sense.
The final blows to Andre’s story came from a doorman, who claimed that he heard a woman scream “No, no, no” in the early hours of September 8, and who also claimed to have heard the sound of Ana’s body colliding with the roof next door. The last problem was of Andre’s own making. Though he had originally stuck to his story of suicide, he began faltering during his conversations with the police, noting that he was too drunk to remember what had actually conspired that night. Just a couple days after Ana’s death, Carl Andre was arrested for her murder.
In the aftermath of Ana’s death, there was a staunch division in the New York art world and many people took sides. About Ana, friend and fellow artist Ron Fischer reported to the Washington Post, quote "She was really full of life, a vital person. I don't think she'd even think of suicide. That's not the woman I know." unquote Naturally Andre’s friends and supporters came out in droves to defend him, maintaining that he wasn’t capable of such an unthinkable act. Yet after three separate indictments over the course of the next 2 and a half years, Carl Andre was acquitted of murder charges on grounds that there was not sufficient evidence to definitively prove he pushed Ana during an argument. He was not guilty, it was deemed, because of reasonable doubt.
Despite being exonerated for her murder, Ana’s death has continued to cast a long shadow over Carl Andre’s reputation. Many of Mendieta’s family members and friends remain convinced of his guilt, pointing to his inconsistencies in police interviews and his request to be tried by a judge rather than a jury as damning evidence of his guilt. And yet Carl Andre’s ongoing status as art world legend--cemented even further now with the passage of time-- has, in many ways, protected him. There have even been rumors, in the past decade, that a secretive group of influential art world figures has been actively engaged in a so-called “whisper campaign” to discredit Mendieta’s personality, attempting to use it as evidence of her mental instability.
In a 2011 New Yorker article on Carl Andre in anticipation of his 2014 retrospective exhibition at the Dia Foundation, the author, Calvin Tompkins, refers to Mendieta as quote “volatile, enchanting, insecure, hot-tempered, and fiercely ambitious,” unquote, and further suggests that she took advantage of Andre’s established connections in the art world to promote her own quote “morbid” work.
It wasn’t the first time that Ana Mendieta’s work was used to “prove” her suicide--and naturally I’m using “prove” in air quotes here. Descriptions of her artworks were used during Andre’s trial by his own lawyers, who cited her images as evidence of their theory of premeditated suicide. Mendieta’s Silhueta series, suddenly, was no longer about powerful womanhood or a forceful acknowledgment of abuse. Instead, it was a signal of a distressed mind, one plotting her own bloody death. It’s a nasty theory. But it worked to set Carl Andre free.
Since Ana Mendieta’s 1985 death, her memory and legacy are forever tied to that awful night, and to her rocky relationship with her husband. And though the cause of the many protesters who gather in front of institutions showing or supporting Carl Andre is indeed a very worthy cause, it also reduces Ana Mendieta, in many ways, to playing the role of victim, focusing less on her work and more on the circumstances surrounding her death. But wait, I hear you say-- aren’t these protesters also doing the good work of taking up the Mendieta mantle and ensuring that her own work is not forgotten? Well, yes-- of course, and that’s an awesome thing. But it might not be entirely warranted. Coco Fusco, a much-praised Cuban-American artist who knew Ana during her life, refers to her as a quote “kind of postmodern Frida Kahlo,” unquote, continuing in the April issue of Art Review that Mendieta hasn’t been overlooked, but quote “on the contrary, she is one of the few Latin American women artists of her era who is widely known and exhibited.” Indeed, her work is included in over 50 public collections around the world, spread across the US, Latin America, Europe, and Australia, and even include museums like the Guggenheim and the Tate---two institutions where protestors have bemoaned her absence in favor of Carl Andre and other male artists. Since 2004 in particular, she has attained more widespread recognition, with important exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C., the Whitney Museum in New York, and several shows in London.
Reclaiming Ana Mendieta from her own life, and especially her own death, is the main hope here. But when her death was so infamous, so tragic, such an act becomes especially difficult. In the recent years since the #MeToo movement sparked a revolution about harassment, violence, and oppression, it seems like Mendieta’s art has been suffused even further not only with the same concerns of Mendieta’s original works, but also with ongoing reminders of her demise. During Carl Andre’s retrospective at Dia: Beacon in 2014, for example, a small group of Ana’s supporters gathered and spilled a bag of chicken guts onto the pavement outside--a reference to Mendieta’s early video work titled Moffitt Building Piece from 1973, where she left a pool of blood on the pavement in Iowa City and filmed the reactions of people walking by. At a similar protest, women made their own versions of Mendieta’s Siluetas in snow banks outside Dia:Beacon and embellished them with fake blood. This repurposing of Ana’s imagery re-engages with this narrative of her forced victimhood and taints the meaning and nuance of her original work. To confuse the blood used in her work with the blood of her death ignores its deeply rooted symbolism and is a disservice to her memory. Now more than ever, it’s important to remember Ana Mendieta for her work-- ambitious, challenging, and powerful, an artist who produced a large and enormously varied body of work centered on reckoning with and reclaiming her identity.
Thank you for listening to the ArtCurious Podcast. This episode was written, produced, and narrated by me, Jennifer Dasal, with additional writing and research help by Grace Harlow and Patricia Gomes. Our theme music is by Alex Davis at alexdavismusic.com, our logo is by Dave Rainey at daveraineydesign.com, and social media help is by Emily Crockett and Caroline Haller. Our production and editorial services are provided by Kaboonki. Video. Content. Ideas. Learn more at kaboonki.com. Additional editing help is by Hannah Roberts. The ArtCurious Podcast is sponsored primarily by Anchorlight. Anchorlight is a creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle. please visit Anchorlightraleigh.com.
The ArtCurious Podcast is also fiscally sponsored by VAE Raleigh, a 501c3 nonprofit creativity incubator. We’re a fully independent podcast, and we rely on sponsors and donations to keep us going, so if you enjoy this show and have the means, please consider giving $10 to help this show, and thank you for your kindness. And if you don’t have money to give, that’s okay! You can help our show as well by leaving a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen-- believe me, it makes a huge difference and helps new listeners tune in. For more details about our show, including the image mentioned in this episode today, please visit our website: artcuriouspodcast.com. We’re also on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at artcuriouspod.
Check back in two weeks as we continue to explore the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in the true crime realm of art history.
