Ana Mendieta: Experimental Films and Videos

A number of unknown media works by Mendieta, including Super 8 and 16mm films, ½ inch reel-to-reel videos, and a sound piece, recently came to light when the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, in collaboration with Galerie Lelong, catalogued, transferred, and preserved the entirety of the artist's moving image works. Revealing aspects of Mendieta's practice that are not as widely known as her ritualistic investigations of body and nature, these newly restored works illuminate Mendieta's technical experimentation and the importance of the moving image to her art.
 
Among the experimental works to be viewed and discussed are Sweating Blood (1973), Moffitt Building Piece (1973), Butterfly (1975), and Energy Charge (1975).   
  
The exhibition Ana Mendieta: Experimental and Interactive Films will be on view at Galerie Lelong through March 26th.

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In a brief yet prolific career, the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) created groundbreaking work in photography, performance, film, drawing, sculpture, mixed media, and site-specific installations. Mendieta is a pioneer among those artists dealing with identity politics and feminism. Her unique hybrid of form and documentation, works that she titled siluetas, are fugitive and potent traces of the artist's inscription of her body in the landscape, transformed by fire, water, and natural materials.

Ana Mendieta's work has been the subject of six major museum retrospectives, the most recent of which, Ana Mendieta: Traces, was organized by the Hayward Gallery in London in 2013 and travelled to the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg and the Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague. Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972–1985 was organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2005 and traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Des Moines Art Center and the Miami Art Museum. The largest collection of Ana Mendieta's films ever presented as a full-scale gallery exhibition in the United States, Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta, was organized by the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 2015. The exhibition will travel to the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Her works are found in over 30 public collections worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Musee d'Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCO), Geneva; and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Tate Gallery, London; Verbund Collection, Vienna; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Mendieta was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948 and died in New York City in 1985.

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Ana Janevski is Associate Curator in the Department of Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art. Recent exhibitions include Scenes for a New Heritage: Contemporary Art from the Collection (2015), Projects 101: Rabih Mroué (2015), Yvonne Rainer: The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there's nothing left to move? (2015), and Musée de la danse: Three Collective Gestures (2013). Prior to MoMA, Janevksi was Curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland, where she curated the large-scale exhibition on Yugoslav experimental film and art from the 1960s and 1970s, As Soon As I Open My Eyes I See a Film (2008).


Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, Ana Mendieta's niece, is the Film Archivist and Administrative Assistant for The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection and shepherded the recent transfer of Mendieta's entire body of filmworks to digital media. Raquel Cecilia Mendieta has been making films for more than twenty years as a producer, director, editor, and writer. Her features and short films have screened in festivals worldwide. She is currently completing a feature-length documentary titled, Ana Mendieta, Rebel by Nature, about the life and art of Ana Mendieta. Her short film Ana Mendieta, Nature Inside screened during the exhibition Ana Mendieta: Traces/Stopy at the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg. She has an M.F.A. from the School of Theater Film and Television at UCLA.

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