Ana Mendieta
(b. Havana, 1948 - d. New York, 1985)
Ana Mendieta was born in Cuba and moved to the United States in 1961. She graduated from the University of Iowa in 1972. Mendieta’s provocative and radical body of work has had a profound effect on generations of performance artists. Using her body with elemental materials, she created compelling visual tableaus exploring life, death, rebirth and spiritual transformation. She had numerous gallery and museum exhibitions all over the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. During her short life she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and the prestigious Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Rome. Her work is in numerous private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York; the Tate Modern in London, United Kingdom; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC; the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois; the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, France; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Whitney Museum for American Art in New York, among others.
