Untitled (Body Print)

In a brief, but groundbreaking career, Mendieta cut a singular path through body, earth, and performance art, developing an experimental and multimedia practice that explored themes ranging from exile and violence to womanhood and landscape. Born in Cuba and sent with her sister to the United States in 1961, through Operation Pedro Pan, she spent the 1970s developing her work at the University of Iowa’s Intermedia Program, established by the German émigré Hans Breder in 1968. Many of the enduring themes of Mendieta’s work emerged during this period as she began to manipulate her body, both in contexts of violence—as in the present photographs—and as an archetypal form.
“I started thinking I would have to act it out and work from my own experience, my own sources,” Mendieta later reflected. “I started immediately using blood—I guess because I think it’s a very powerful, magical thing. I don’t see it as a negative force” (quoted in J. Wilson, “Ana Mendieta Plants her Garden, Village Voice, 13-19 August 1980, p. 71). In five photographs, Untitled (Body Prints) displays Mendieta’s naked and bloodied body beneath a dark, transparent cloth. The tight framing and foreshortening of the first three images dramatize her supine, corpse-like form, arms folded across her abdomen. The last two photographs reveal the “body print:” the cloth bears the imprint of Mendieta’s body and blood in a way that recalls the Shroud of Turin, here conjoining violence, death, and sacrifice in a grim, unnerving sequence of images.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park