# A Body Made of Earth *A Biography of Ana Mendieta* — Legendary Biographies No. 049 - **Subject:** Ana Maria Mendieta Oti - **Written by:** Inés Cabrera - **Shelf:** Art & Design / Visual Art - **Published:** 2025 - **Extent:** 191 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 191 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **Hardcover:** $24.99 — 6 × 9 in · 191 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90470-034-8) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Imogen Vey (ISBN 979-8-90623-015-7) - **Content notes:** domestic violence; suspicious death Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/049-a-body-made-of-earth.html ## About this book On a September night in 1985, a woman fell thirty-four floors from a Greenwich Village apartment window. She was Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-born artist who had spent two decades pressing her body into mud, sand, gunpowder, and grass — making work that asked what it meant to leave a trace. The man in the apartment was her husband, the celebrated minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. He was tried for her murder and acquitted. Inés Cabrera returns to the life behind the verdict. She follows Mendieta from the Operation Peter Pan flight that carried her, at twelve, from Havana to an Iowa orphanage, through the Iowa City studios where she first buried herself in the earth, to Rome, Mexico, and the downtown New York art world that alternately championed and overlooked her. Drawing on letters, studio notes, and conversations with the friends who have spent forty years refusing to let her name be filed away, Cabrera reconstructs an artist whose Siluetas — silhouettes carved into landscape — anticipated almost everything contemporary art would later claim as its own. She also reckons with the slogan that has trailed Mendieta's work into every museum that shows it: Where is Ana Mendieta. The question is literal and it is not. It is about a window, a marriage, an art history written by the surviving. It is also about what a woman makes when she knows the ground will eventually take it back. ## Contents 1. The Question 2. The House in Havana 3. Operation Peter Pan 4. The Iowa Orphanages 5. The Foreign Girl 6. The University 7. The Blood Works 8. The Siluetas 9. The Return 10. The Feminist Art World 11. The Downtown Scene 12. The Cuban 13. Carl Andre 14. The Thirty-Fourth Floor 15. The Trial 16. The Closing of Ranks 17. Where Is Ana Mendieta? 18. The Earth-Body 19. Andre ## Questions **Who is A Body Made of Earth about?** Ana Maria Mendieta Oti. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case A Body Made of Earth — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,472 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 63,500 words, 19 chapters, 191 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. **Does this book carry content warnings?** Yes: domestic violence; suspicious death. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle. ## The writer Inés Cabrera is an Argentine-Mexican journalist who covered Latin American politics for El País and Le Monde Diplomatique. Her career has centered on investigative reporting, archival research, and documenting the lives of women who navigated the turbulent political landscape of late twentieth-century South America. Her writing focuses on reclaiming lost histories and exploring the intersection of art, politics, and memory. In her book, Where is Ana Mendieta, she examines these themes through a deeply researched biographical lens, focusing on the human stories behind historical struggles. She lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she translates political essays and tends to her collection of vintage typewriters.