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Where Is Ana Mendieta?: Identity, Performativity, and Exile
Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-born artist who lived in exile in the United States, was one of the most provocative and complex personalities of the 1970s’ artworld. In Where Is Ana Mendieta? art historian Jane Blocker provides an in-depth critical analysis of Mendieta’s diverse body of work. Although her untimely death in 1985 remains shrouded in controversy, her life and artistic legacy provide a unique vantage point from which to consider the history of performance art, installation, and earth works, as well as feminism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism.
Taken from banners carried in a 1992 protest outside the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the title phrase “Where is Ana Mendieta?” evokes not only the suspicious and tragic circumstances surrounding her death but also the conspicuous absence of women artists from high-profile exhibitions. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Judith Butler, Joseph Roach, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha, Blocker discusses the power of Mendieta’s earth-and-body art to alter, unsettle, and broaden the terms of identity itself. She shows how Mendieta used exile as a discursive position from which to disrupt dominant categories, analyzing as well Mendieta’s use of mythology and anthropology, the ephemeral nature of her media, and the debates over her ethnic, gender, and national identities.
As the first major critical examination of this enigmatic artist’s work, Where Is Ana Mendieta? will interest a broad audience, particularly those involved with the production, criticism, theory, and history of contemporary art.
Taken from banners carried in a 1992 protest outside the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the title phrase “Where is Ana Mendieta?” evokes not only the suspicious and tragic circumstances surrounding her death but also the conspicuous absence of women artists from high-profile exhibitions. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Judith Butler, Joseph Roach, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha, Blocker discusses the power of Mendieta’s earth-and-body art to alter, unsettle, and broaden the terms of identity itself. She shows how Mendieta used exile as a discursive position from which to disrupt dominant categories, analyzing as well Mendieta’s use of mythology and anthropology, the ephemeral nature of her media, and the debates over her ethnic, gender, and national identities.
As the first major critical examination of this enigmatic artist’s work, Where Is Ana Mendieta? will interest a broad audience, particularly those involved with the production, criticism, theory, and history of contemporary art.
184 pages, Paperback
First published February 3, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
March 18, 2024
This. Freaking. Book… idek what to say.. I read it in sophomore year a little over a year ago for a long research paper and it changed my view of the art world and the world itself. Ana Mendieta is one of the most important people in contemporary art history but even putting her in that box feels limiting and disrespectful. If you make art, you need to read this. If you’re into art history at all you need to read this. MEN WHO MAKE ART NEED TO FUCKING READ THIS. My only criticisms of it is that it is densely packed with information and inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t have a lot of background for its topic. It’s about Mendieta’s life and career and just reading about her and her work you can feel how she stepped with magic and wisdom. Nonfiction that made me feeeeeeel.
November 20, 2023
Genius read of an under known and genius artist
December 17, 2024
uma experiência dolorida.. ana mendieta foi uma artista tao sensivel e potente e a frente de seu tempo e parece que até hoje não recebe o reconhecimento que merece... o fim da sua vida me doi tanto. queria que tudo fosse diferente 💔 enfim o livro compila e traz otimas analises da obra da artista
November 13, 2020
“Mendieta’s art lies at the heart of what we know to be the postmodern. It not only reflects but in fact produces the fragmentation of the subject that is one of the founding principles of that ‘cultural dominant’. It directly engages the question of identity formation in terms of gender, sexuality, race, and class. It is also deeply indebted to the conditions of postcoloniality and the politics of the subaltern that are coterminous with the postmodern. At the same time, and very significantly, this work dramatizes the inability of that term – the postmodern – to cover adequately the phenomena it attempts to name.”
- page 134
- page 134
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November 20, 2024ephemeral art really is the bees knees.
(silueta de laberinta) “they may allude to her presence, but they can only signify her absence; in these shadows, she is always already somewhere else.”
(silueta de laberinta) “they may allude to her presence, but they can only signify her absence; in these shadows, she is always already somewhere else.”
February 2, 2022
I really enjoyed reading this book. I agree with Blocker’s own assertion that her analysis serves “not to present an exhaustive explanation of [Mendieta’s] life and work (if such a thing were possible), but to think as clearly as I can about her place within a set of issues that mattered in her lifetime and still matter today” (pg 134). I leave this reading not with a feeling of having gotten to know the full body Mendieta’s work or its themes, but rather with a sense of how Mendieta’s work is already gone - that any engagement with her work performs it’s absence, and that this performance is more intentional than (according to Blocker) most critics give her credit for.
I particularly liked the way Blocker evokes the troubling aspects of Mendieta’s work, the way Mendieta plays with both essentialism and liminality to challenge the assumed stability of identity, of nations and borders, of “home.” Blocker’s characterizations of home, exile, and travel effectively highlight these emerging meanings of Mendieta’s works. Blocker describes that “the works’ most profound effect is to be located, not in their seeming sympathy with their viewers’ experience, or in their reassurance that we are not alone in our alienation, but in their ability to produce this very sense of loss and orphanhood in us” (Pg 82). I think this book did the same thing, although I admit that it did help me feel less alone in alienation along the way.
The book also provides some useful critical analysis of the way race as it is constructed outside of the US is understood in the US (it isn’t) and the way that factors into Mendieta’s work through her own symbolic identifications. I wonder if this book was written today if there may have been more time spent on that - does Mendieta’s exilic identification as a woman of color in the US, rather than a white Cuban of Spanish descent, end up reinforcing the power of whiteness (and therefore anti-Blackness) by revealing it as shape shifting and unstable? Or does it trouble the assumptions it departs from? Both/and?
Overall a compelling appeal towards embracing fragmentation, movement, and performativity in Mendieta’s work, if not to preserve it or find it a home, then to return to our own “homes” with new eyes and see something else.
I particularly liked the way Blocker evokes the troubling aspects of Mendieta’s work, the way Mendieta plays with both essentialism and liminality to challenge the assumed stability of identity, of nations and borders, of “home.” Blocker’s characterizations of home, exile, and travel effectively highlight these emerging meanings of Mendieta’s works. Blocker describes that “the works’ most profound effect is to be located, not in their seeming sympathy with their viewers’ experience, or in their reassurance that we are not alone in our alienation, but in their ability to produce this very sense of loss and orphanhood in us” (Pg 82). I think this book did the same thing, although I admit that it did help me feel less alone in alienation along the way.
The book also provides some useful critical analysis of the way race as it is constructed outside of the US is understood in the US (it isn’t) and the way that factors into Mendieta’s work through her own symbolic identifications. I wonder if this book was written today if there may have been more time spent on that - does Mendieta’s exilic identification as a woman of color in the US, rather than a white Cuban of Spanish descent, end up reinforcing the power of whiteness (and therefore anti-Blackness) by revealing it as shape shifting and unstable? Or does it trouble the assumptions it departs from? Both/and?
Overall a compelling appeal towards embracing fragmentation, movement, and performativity in Mendieta’s work, if not to preserve it or find it a home, then to return to our own “homes” with new eyes and see something else.
February 19, 2024
BOOM! what an immediately gripping account of ana mendieta's work in the wake of her passing. i couldn't but the book down and had to finish it through. i first heard of mendieta through the passing of her partner (the man who had allegedly murdered her) and encountered most of her work as flashes online as rally cries. i was hooked by photos of her submerging herself in the earth and figures of her tied to trees. i was ecstatic when i found out a book had been written in sole dedication of her work, how illuminating it must have been that someone poured their critical energies for them, and read the book instantly.
art historian jane blocker makes it clear by the end of the book that she isn't pursuing mendieta's work in the echo chamber of praise, less it falls into the traps of unenaximed faults of art history writing at the time. she wrote not in the name of the misplaced prestige but in honor of mendieta's mesmerizing complexity, her person, her collaboration with earth in part of her exile as the other: as having been born and identifying as a woman, as being of cuban descent and exiled in the united states, as making an earth goddess poetics of her own. blocker writes with such clarity, and sees everything in her wake in a state of critical reverie. this is the type of book you read for the first time and say "huh, i think i might go for that MFA degree" (i have been warned that no one shouldn't). brilliant, burning book. i can't wait to reread it soon
art historian jane blocker makes it clear by the end of the book that she isn't pursuing mendieta's work in the echo chamber of praise, less it falls into the traps of unenaximed faults of art history writing at the time. she wrote not in the name of the misplaced prestige but in honor of mendieta's mesmerizing complexity, her person, her collaboration with earth in part of her exile as the other: as having been born and identifying as a woman, as being of cuban descent and exiled in the united states, as making an earth goddess poetics of her own. blocker writes with such clarity, and sees everything in her wake in a state of critical reverie. this is the type of book you read for the first time and say "huh, i think i might go for that MFA degree" (i have been warned that no one shouldn't). brilliant, burning book. i can't wait to reread it soon
December 14, 2025
Mind võlus see, kuidas autor sidus kontseptuaalselt omavahel Ana Mendieta surmast tekkinud protestiplakatite lausungi “Kus on Ana Mendieta” tema kunsti olemusega, milleks on kadumine, haihtumine ja häving.
See pole kindlasti biograafia kunstniku elust, vaid feministliku, postkoloniaalse ja postmodernse käsitluse sõel, mille peale Mendieta kunst eralduma peaks. Lugemine pole kergete killast ja vajab akadeemilisi eelteadmisi. Ometi tundus autori argumentatsioon veenev, aga ehk lihtsalt minu pädevuses pole nii tuumakate teooriate seas ekselda. Vahepeal tundus, et ta pani Mendieta loomingule enda teooritiliste tõlgenduse päitsed pähe. Aga jällegi pole ma piisavalt kursis kõigega, mida Mendieta enda loomingu kohta öelnud on ning kaugeltki mitte kõigega, mida ta teinud on.
Kindlasti oli tegemist huvitava ja rikastava lugemisega, mis suhteliselt veenvalt lükkas ümber varasemaid tõlegndusi kunstniku elust ja loomingust.
See pole kindlasti biograafia kunstniku elust, vaid feministliku, postkoloniaalse ja postmodernse käsitluse sõel, mille peale Mendieta kunst eralduma peaks. Lugemine pole kergete killast ja vajab akadeemilisi eelteadmisi. Ometi tundus autori argumentatsioon veenev, aga ehk lihtsalt minu pädevuses pole nii tuumakate teooriate seas ekselda. Vahepeal tundus, et ta pani Mendieta loomingule enda teooritiliste tõlgenduse päitsed pähe. Aga jällegi pole ma piisavalt kursis kõigega, mida Mendieta enda loomingu kohta öelnud on ning kaugeltki mitte kõigega, mida ta teinud on.
Kindlasti oli tegemist huvitava ja rikastava lugemisega, mis suhteliselt veenvalt lükkas ümber varasemaid tõlegndusi kunstniku elust ja loomingust.
October 9, 2022
The success of this focused analysis of Mendieta’s performance and earth-works lies not only in its grounding in race, gender, and post-colonial theories, but ultimately in its recognition of the limitations of historiographic analysis in capturing the essence of performance-based artwork predicated on loss. Blocker delves into themes of Fire, Earth, Exile, Travel, and Body, and convincingly universalizes works which are all too often interpreted as parochial, largely by white male critics.
June 9, 2020
I have not finished the book but I have found some errors. The writer is confusing and mixing two works of art, she also has the year wrong. Good critique of the Donald Kusprit text about Mendieta. Also, I like that she proposes to analyze the work of Mendieta from a performance studies frame. Not the best study of Mendieta's work but a respectable one.
November 4, 2024
Deep thought and meditation on a great artist
The author presents a new way of viewing and attempting to understand the work of Ana Mendieta. The author illustrates her points using both literature and specific examples of the work of Mendieta. Woven throughout is relevant colonial and contemporary history. Highly recommended for a deep dive.
The author presents a new way of viewing and attempting to understand the work of Ana Mendieta. The author illustrates her points using both literature and specific examples of the work of Mendieta. Woven throughout is relevant colonial and contemporary history. Highly recommended for a deep dive.
December 31, 2022
Excellent overview of Mendieta's key works. I particularly liked the discussion on home and travel in her work. Great read
February 6, 2024
“Location and dislocation are laminated, mutually sustaining, sometimes indistinguishable sources of power.”
March 8, 2024
Rot in piss, Carl Andre.
April 4, 2024
I had thought the book would have been more of a biography for Ana Mendieta.
The writing is very intricate & hard to read through the entirety of the book. There aren't alot of pages in the book for the price listed.
I feel it has repetition in the book & does compare her artwork to other artists. She also uses Freud as a representation of her work.
The writing is very intricate & hard to read through the entirety of the book. There aren't alot of pages in the book for the price listed.
I feel it has repetition in the book & does compare her artwork to other artists. She also uses Freud as a representation of her work.
December 24, 2010
Where is Ana Mendieta? To ask this question is to recognize the contingency of identity and the role of performativity in the production of gender, nation, exile, and Latinidad. It is markedly different in this way than to ask “Who is Ana Mendieta?”suggesting some essential unconditional truth in her fundamental identity – and the legibility of the relationship between her art and her identity.
To answer the unanswerable though – you may find it useful to learn the origin of the question for Jane Blocker. It was the question asked at a protest outside the Guggenheim Museum by the Women’s Action Committee outraged not only by the exclusion of women and women of color (and Mendieta in particular) but the inclusion of Carl Andre, her accused killer. To locate Mendieta (a Cuban-born artist who lived in the US from age 12) is to locate her within an art establishment to which she did not fit. Much of her work was body work/earth work performance in the context of the feminist movement, the rise of civil rights struggles, and an artistic move towards performance denying the production of art as commodity. Her work was often exhibited in exhibitions of women artists, women of color artists, or Latina/o artists. Such contexts , Blocker contends, often are misleading for Mendieta’s art as they seek to find the commonalities, the similarities among women artists or Latin@ artists rather than examine the differences among their work and contexts. For Blocker, the answer to the question Where is Ana Mendieta lies exactly in its unanswerability. As Blocker contends, even as Mendieta and her work were “shaped by competing aesthetic, sexual, racial, and nationalist ideologies . . . it is crucial to understand the means by which she confounds historiography.” The significance of Mendieta and her work as well as the significance of the rhetorical question, “Where is Ana Mendieta?” is the way in which her location cannot be fixed.
Performativity is a key term for Blocker. I love her explanation of this oft-used term, “For my purposes, the performative describes a social class of actions that are derived from and may be plotted within a grid of power relationships. Like the more common notion of performance, its emphasis on liminality over legibility and change over fixity is effective in placing interpretive emphasis on actions rather than on commodifiable objects. Yet it does not marginalize performance as a narrowly artistic endeavor but rather opens up artworks as social practice to the relations and interrelations – the performances of everyday life and culture – in which they are embedded. It goes beyond the idea of performance to consider in greater detail the conditions of identity, the practice of historiography, and the effects of representations and, indeed, thus, to encompass Mendieta’s work.”
She uses performativity to read the performative actions of Menideta’s work but also to read the performance of identity through gender, race, and nationality drawing not only on the work of Butler but reading Bhabba’s Nation and Narration as performativity. She also draws extensively on Freud’s concept of heimleich/umheimlach to suggest the ways that Menideta’s work produced the experience of exile in the viewer exposing the liminality and falsity of a claim to home/nation. Drawing on both Kristeva and Bhabba, Brooker explains how the “exile/foreigner/alien poses a threat to the nation’s coherence.” She brings Benedict Anderson into the conversation to link Kristeva, Butler, Bhabba, and Freud in her final analysis of Mendieta and her work as located in exile and producing exile. I found these chapters of the book (exile and travel) particularly productive for enhancing my own reading of nationality as a kind of place-based identity in a more transnational context.
To answer the unanswerable though – you may find it useful to learn the origin of the question for Jane Blocker. It was the question asked at a protest outside the Guggenheim Museum by the Women’s Action Committee outraged not only by the exclusion of women and women of color (and Mendieta in particular) but the inclusion of Carl Andre, her accused killer. To locate Mendieta (a Cuban-born artist who lived in the US from age 12) is to locate her within an art establishment to which she did not fit. Much of her work was body work/earth work performance in the context of the feminist movement, the rise of civil rights struggles, and an artistic move towards performance denying the production of art as commodity. Her work was often exhibited in exhibitions of women artists, women of color artists, or Latina/o artists. Such contexts , Blocker contends, often are misleading for Mendieta’s art as they seek to find the commonalities, the similarities among women artists or Latin@ artists rather than examine the differences among their work and contexts. For Blocker, the answer to the question Where is Ana Mendieta lies exactly in its unanswerability. As Blocker contends, even as Mendieta and her work were “shaped by competing aesthetic, sexual, racial, and nationalist ideologies . . . it is crucial to understand the means by which she confounds historiography.” The significance of Mendieta and her work as well as the significance of the rhetorical question, “Where is Ana Mendieta?” is the way in which her location cannot be fixed.
Performativity is a key term for Blocker. I love her explanation of this oft-used term, “For my purposes, the performative describes a social class of actions that are derived from and may be plotted within a grid of power relationships. Like the more common notion of performance, its emphasis on liminality over legibility and change over fixity is effective in placing interpretive emphasis on actions rather than on commodifiable objects. Yet it does not marginalize performance as a narrowly artistic endeavor but rather opens up artworks as social practice to the relations and interrelations – the performances of everyday life and culture – in which they are embedded. It goes beyond the idea of performance to consider in greater detail the conditions of identity, the practice of historiography, and the effects of representations and, indeed, thus, to encompass Mendieta’s work.”
She uses performativity to read the performative actions of Menideta’s work but also to read the performance of identity through gender, race, and nationality drawing not only on the work of Butler but reading Bhabba’s Nation and Narration as performativity. She also draws extensively on Freud’s concept of heimleich/umheimlach to suggest the ways that Menideta’s work produced the experience of exile in the viewer exposing the liminality and falsity of a claim to home/nation. Drawing on both Kristeva and Bhabba, Brooker explains how the “exile/foreigner/alien poses a threat to the nation’s coherence.” She brings Benedict Anderson into the conversation to link Kristeva, Butler, Bhabba, and Freud in her final analysis of Mendieta and her work as located in exile and producing exile. I found these chapters of the book (exile and travel) particularly productive for enhancing my own reading of nationality as a kind of place-based identity in a more transnational context.
January 23, 2011
Ana Mendieta was a feminist artist of the 70s. The title of the book comes from a protest outside the Guggenheim Museum by the Women’s Action Committee in June 1992, outraged not only by the exclusion of women and women of color including Mendieta against the inclusion of one Cuban-born artist Carl Andre, her accused killer.
She came to the US as an exile of Cuba when she was a young girl. This framed her life and her work asking questions of color, gender, ethnicity, nation, and exile. Mendieta's work often included her own body in conjunction with the earth work in a performance context placing interpretive emphasis on actions rather than on commodifiable objects. Her work was most often exhibited in exhibitions of women artists, women of color artists, or Latina artists.
Ana Mendieta's short life, aesthetic choices, gender, ethnicity, and politics all contributed to her absence from a variety of discursive sites. It was so interesting to have access to this book and learn about Ana.
She came to the US as an exile of Cuba when she was a young girl. This framed her life and her work asking questions of color, gender, ethnicity, nation, and exile. Mendieta's work often included her own body in conjunction with the earth work in a performance context placing interpretive emphasis on actions rather than on commodifiable objects. Her work was most often exhibited in exhibitions of women artists, women of color artists, or Latina artists.
Ana Mendieta's short life, aesthetic choices, gender, ethnicity, and politics all contributed to her absence from a variety of discursive sites. It was so interesting to have access to this book and learn about Ana.
February 11, 2016
Interesting look at nationhood, womanhood, and colonized identity - a little repetitive, a little too flowery at some parts, but a very real struggle between recording and discussing Mendieta and the idea of disappearance/the idea that being added to the art historical canon legitimizes one's work
May 27, 2021
"As an interpretive category, 'postmodernity' is like the small box carefully padded with tissue; it is the way we try to preserve a time whose single most important characteristic is loss (the death of the author, the instability of the signifier, the victory of the simulation over the real)."
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews