Chapter 1The Question

Foreword

I spent thirty years writing about men in uniforms. Generals, colonels, presidents-for-life, the ministers who served them and the tribunals that acquitted them — that was my beat, in Buenos Aires and Mexico City and Santiago and the capitals in between, for the papers that would print what the men in uniforms preferred not to read. And alongside the men, always, the women: the mothers who marched with photographs pinned to their chests, the widows who kept the files, the daughters who spent decades asking a single question of institutions that had organized themselves around not answering it. When I told colleagues I was writing a book about an artist — a sculptor's wife, they said, an art-world story, a New York story — more than one of them asked if I was leaving the beat. I was not leaving the beat. I had found the beat somewhere I did not expect it.

Because the question that gives this book its title is a question I already knew. Where is Ana Mendieta? In the countries I covered, that grammar has a history. ¿Dónde está? is the question the mothers of the disappeared asked, in plazas and courtrooms and church basements, of governments that answered with silence because silence was cheaper than the truth. When I first encountered the question — painted on banners, carried into museum lobbies, addressed to institutions that exhibited the work of the man who was acquitted of killing her — I recognized it at once. It is the question you ask when you know the answer and cannot get anyone official to say it. It is the question that keeps a person present by the act of asking. I did not choose this subject. The question chose me, the way the questions on my beat always had.

And the life, when I began to examine it, turned out to be a Latin American political story wearing an art-world disguise. A revolution. A prominent family on the wrong side of it. A father who paid for his opposition with eighteen years in prison. Two girls put on a plane alone, twelve and fifteen, sent north into a country that did not want them, a language they did not speak, orphanages that had no category for what they were. A return, two decades later, that resolved nothing, because returns from exile never resolve anything; I have watched exiles go home my whole career, and the going home is always a second displacement. And then a death — a fall, a scream, a trial, an acquittal that was not an exoneration — and after the death, the thing I knew best of all: an institution closing ranks around a powerful man, and a record with a hole in the middle of it, and decades of asking.

I expected the death to be the story. That is the deformation of my profession — we go where the body is. What I found, working through the public record, the trial testimony as it survives, the press archive, the exhibition catalogs, her published writings, the memoirs and criticism and protest literature of forty years, was that the death kept trying to swallow the life and the life kept refusing to be swallowed. I would sit down with the record of the trial and find myself back in Iowa, in the blood works, in the mud of the Siluetas, in the limestone at Jaruco where she carved her body into the rock of the island she had been taken from. The work kept insisting. The work was not evidence in a case. The work was the answer to the question, and it had been the answer all along, and almost no one had treated it that way.

What I found, in the end, was a person — fierce, funny, profane, ambitious, difficult in the way that institutions punish in women and reward in men — and a set of structures that had reduced the person twice: once while she was alive, by refusing her the recognition her work had earned, and once after she was dead, by converting her into a symbol so that no one would have to look at her. I have spent my career watching that reduction performed on the women of my continent. The victim, the martyr, the saint, the cautionary tale. Every one of those categories is a way of not seeing.

This book is my attempt to see her. Not to solve the case — the tribunals of my beat taught me long ago that a verdict is not the same as the truth, and this book does not pretend to a verdict the evidence cannot support. What it attempts is older and, I think, more useful: to put the person back where the symbol has been standing, and to let the question that has been asked for forty years finally receive the long answer it deserves. She was not a footnote in a sculptor's biography. She was not a slogan. She was a woman from Havana who marked the earth of two continents so that the earth would remember her. The earth has kept its part of the bargain. This book is an attempt to keep ours.

— Inés Cabrera, Mexico City

Chapter 1 · The Question

Where is Ana Mendieta?

The question has been asked in museum lobbies and gallery openings and protest marches and art school classrooms and on the steps of the Dia Art Foundation and in the pages of Artforum and on social media and in the halls of the Tate Modern and in the whispered conversations of women artists who know the answer but cannot get anyone to listen. The question has been painted on banners and printed on t-shirts and screamed from the balconies of exhibition spaces and written in blood-red letters on sidewalks outside galleries that show the work of Carl Andre. The question is a protest chant, a rallying cry, a rebuke, and an accusation, and it has been all of these things for more than thirty years, and the institutions to which it is addressed have not answered it, not because the answer is complicated but because the answer is inconvenient.

The answer is: she is dead. Mendieta died on September 8, 1985 after falling from the 34th-floor window of the apartment at 300 Mercer Street, New York City, that she shared with her husband, sculptor Carl Andre. A doorman on the street below heard a woman's screams and then the impact, just before 5:30 AM. Carl Andre was indicted on second-degree murder charges. Andre was tried before Justice Alvin Schlesinger; he waived his right to a jury trial. On February 11, 1988, Schlesinger acquitted Andre. The 911 call Andre made that morning, recorded and later played at trial, contained the phrase that would define the case in public memory: "My wife is an artist, and I'm an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, eh, exposed to the public than she was." She was thirty-six years old. She had been married for eight months. She was one of the most original and radical artists of the late twentieth century. The art world then largely chose the husband over the dead wife, continued to show his work in its most prestigious spaces, and allowed her work to slip into relative obscurity for decades.

That is where Ana Mendieta is. She is dead, and the circumstances of her death have never been adequately explained, and the art world that profited from her husband's career while neglecting hers has never been held to account, and the full story of who she was before the fall has never been told in a form that treats her as a complete human being rather than as a symbol, a victim, a cautionary tale, or a footnote in someone else's biography.

This book is an attempt to answer the question properly. Not with a slogan and not with a verdict and not with a eulogy but with a biography, the one that should have been written decades ago, the one that would have been written decades ago if the subject had been a white man who fell from a window under suspicious circumstances eight months after marrying a Cuban woman. The biography does not exist. The book you are reading intends to fill the gap.

The received narrative of Ana Mendieta, the narrative that circulates in exhibition catalogs, art criticism, Wikipedia entries, protest literature, and the occasional magazine profile, has a definite shape, and the shape is the first thing that must be examined, because it is the obstacle that any honest account of her life must overcome.

The received narrative goes like this. She was a Cuban exile, torn from her homeland as a child, who spent her life making art about displacement and return. She pressed her body into the earth, into dirt, sand, mud, grass, snow, stone, and called the impressions Siluetas, and the Siluetas were about the exile's longing for a lost homeland, and the longing was tragic, and the art was beautiful in a tragic way, and then she married Carl Andre, and then she died, and then the art world forgot her, and now feminists protest at Carl Andre exhibitions and ask where she is.

This narrative is not false. Every element in it corresponds to something real. She was a Cuban exile. She was torn from her homeland as a child. She did press her body into the earth. The Siluetas do address displacement and return. She did marry Carl Andre. She did die. The art world did forget her. Feminists do protest.

But the narrative is radically incomplete, and its incompleteness is not innocent. The narrative does exactly to Ana Mendieta what the art world did to her: it reduces her to a set of themes that can be consumed without difficulty, without confrontation, without the discomfort of encountering an actual person in full. The exile is aestheticized. The body art is sentimentalized. The death is melodramatized. The protest is commodified. And the woman herself, fierce, funny, profane, brilliant, Cuban in a way that most American art critics could not begin to comprehend, angry in a way that made the people around her uncomfortable, ambitious in a way that the art world permitted in men but punished in women, disappears behind the veil of the narrative that claims to honor her.

The received narrative has a function. It allows the art world to express sympathy for Ana Mendieta without actually reckoning with what happened to her. It allows curators to include her in feminist exhibitions without asking why she was excluded from those same institutions when she was alive. It allows critics to praise her Siluetas as beautiful works about exile without asking what it actually meant to be a twelve-year-old Cuban girl deposited in an Iowa orphanage in 1961 without her parents, without her language, without her country, without anyone who looked like her or talked like her or understood the first thing about where she had come from. It allows the protest to function as a performance of virtue (we ask where she is, and by asking, we demonstrate that we care) without requiring anyone to answer the question in a way that would implicate the institutions that are asking it.

The received narrative, in other words, is a form of erasure that presents itself as recovery. It says: we remember her. But what it remembers is a reduced version of her that serves the purposes of the people doing the remembering. The exile serves a narrative of cultural displacement that is politically respectable in contemporary art discourse. The body art serves a narrative of feminist practice that is intellectually fashionable. The death serves a narrative of male violence against women that is emotionally satisfying. And the protest serves a narrative of institutional accountability that is morally flattering to the people who participate in it.

None of this is the same as knowing who she was.

Who she was requires more than the received narrative provides. It requires Havana in 1948, when Cuba was not yet the Cold War symbol it would become but a real place with a defined social structure that the Mendieta family occupied a particular position within. It requires the private Catholic girls' school in Havana where she and her sister Raquelin studied before the revolution changed everything. It requires Ignacio Mendieta, her father, who opposed Castro's government and who would pay for that opposition with eighteen years in a Cuban prison, and Raquel Oti de Mendieta, her mother, who would not see her daughters for five years and would not see her husband for nearly two decades. It requires Operation Peter Pan — not the sanitized version that appears in Cuban-American community celebrations but the actual operation, with its actual consequences for the actual children who were sent, alone, to a country they did not know, in a language they did not speak, to families and institutions that had not asked for them and did not always want them.

It requires Iowa. Not the idea of Iowa, the pastoral landscape that appears in the Silueta photographs, but the actual Iowa of the early 1960s, one of the whitest states in America, where two dark-haired, Spanish-speaking Cuban girls were placed in foster homes and orphanages and juvenile facilities that had no experience with foreign children and no interest in acquiring any. It requires the named institutions where Ana and Raquelin were placed, and the actual forms of neglect and hostility they encountered, and the lasting damage that was done to a child who had been separated from everything she knew and deposited in a place that had no category for what she was.

It requires the University of Iowa, where she arrived in the late 1960s as one of the only Latina students on campus and one of the only women in the graduate art program, and where she found, in the Intermedia program run by Hans Breder, a space that was sufficiently experimental and sufficiently unpoliced to permit the kind of work she needed to make. It requires the Rape Piece of 1973, not the sanitized art-historical account of a "performance" but the actual event: a tableau staged in a wooded area near the University of Iowa campus, where Mendieta lay half-naked and face-down on the ground, smeared with stage blood, while classmates she had invited walked the path and found her. Mendieta returned to the imagery of rape repeatedly across 1973, in the weeks and months after a fellow Iowa student, Sarah Ann Ottens, was raped and murdered in Rienow Hall on March 13, 1973 — the event that catalyzed her engagement with the subject. The university did not know what to do with her.

It requires the Siluetas — all of them, not just the ones that photograph well for catalogs, but the ones made in mud and ice and fire and blood and gunpowder, the ones that burned and melted and washed away, the ones that were never photographed, the ones that existed for an hour or a day and then were gone. It requires understanding what it meant for a woman who had been separated from the earth of her homeland to press her body into the earth of her exile and make a mark that would disappear. The impermanence was not a failure of the medium. The impermanence was the point.

It requires New York, where she moved in 1978 and entered the downtown art scene at a moment when the art world was being remade by feminism and minimalism and performance art and the market was beginning its transformation into the speculative financial instrument it would become by the end of the 1980s. It requires the A.I.R. Gallery, the first women's cooperative gallery in New York, where Mendieta showed and where she was part of a community of women artists who were trying to build an alternative to the male-dominated gallery system. It requires the actual tensions within the feminist art world: between white feminists and feminists of color, between American feminists and immigrant feminists, between feminists who wanted inclusion in existing institutions and feminists who wanted to destroy those institutions and build something else. Mendieta was on every fault line. She was a woman of color in a white feminist movement. She was an immigrant in an American art world. She was making work about the body at a moment when the critical establishment was turning away from the body and toward the conceptual. She did not fit. She never fit. The not-fitting was one of her most essential qualities, and the art world punished her for it while she was alive and sentimentalized it after she was dead.

It requires Carl Andre. Not the version of Carl Andre that appears in the protest literature, the murderer who got away with it, and not the version that appears in the art-historical record, the great minimalist sculptor who happened to have a troubled marriage, but the actual person, and the actual relationship, and the actual dynamics of power and alcohol and ambition and resentment that characterized the marriage from its beginning. It requires understanding what it meant for Ana Mendieta, a Cuban immigrant woman artist who was struggling for recognition, to marry Carl Andre, an established white American male artist whose career was secure and whose place in art history was already assured. It requires understanding the entrenched forms of dependence and subordination that the marriage created, not because Andre was a monster but because the art world's structures ensured that the established male artist's wife would always be the junior partner, regardless of the quality of her work.

And it requires the night of September 8, 1985, and the thirty-fourth-floor window, and the fall, and the scream the doorman heard, and the argument the neighbors heard, and the 911 call, and the trial, and the acquittal, and the decades of silence and protest and erasure and recovery that followed. It requires all of this because Ana Mendieta was all of this, and the received narrative's reduction of her to a set of themes, exile, body, death, protest, is itself a form of violence against her, a second erasure that completes the work the first one began.

The method that structures this biography is designed for exactly this kind of recovery. Stacy Schiff has built her career on the rescue of historical figures from the narratives that have buried them. Cleopatra buried by two millennia of Roman propaganda and orientalist fantasy. Vera Nabokov buried by her husband's genius and the assumption that a wife who served a great man could not herself be interesting. The women of Salem buried by the religious hysteria that convicted them and the subsequent centuries of cultural mythology that turned them into Halloween costumes.

Ana Mendieta has been buried differently. She has been buried by a combination of forces native to the contemporary art world: the market's preference for the living over the dead and for the male over the female; the critical establishment's inability to categorize work that crossed the boundaries between body art, land art, performance art, and sculpture; the feminist movement's inability to fully integrate the concerns of women of color into a framework built by and for white women; the Cuban-American community's political conservatism, which made a radical leftist artist an uncomfortable representative; and, most devastatingly, the art world's decision, after her death, to close ranks around the man who was charged with killing her rather than to ask what had happened to the woman who was killed.

The burial has been effective but not total. Mendieta's work has survived. The Siluetas exist in photographic and film documentation. Her performances are recorded. Her writings are archived. Her friends and colleagues and fellow artists remember her. And the question — Where is Ana Mendieta? — has kept her name alive even as the institutions that should have championed her work chose instead to champion her husband's.

This biography proceeds from the conviction that the actual Ana Mendieta is more interesting, more complex, more challenging, and more important than the reduced version that the received narrative offers. The actual Ana Mendieta was not merely a tragic exile who made beautiful ephemeral art and was killed by her husband. She was a political person with named political commitments. She was a Cuban person with a complex relationship to Cuba that was not simply nostalgic. She was an angry person whose anger was productive and generative and not merely a symptom of trauma. She was a funny person whose humor does not appear in the received narrative because the received narrative has no room for a dead woman who was also funny. She was a difficult person who alienated people she needed and antagonized institutions she depended on, not because she was self-destructive but because she refused to perform the gratitude and deference that the art world demanded of women artists who were also immigrants and also people of color.

She was, in short, a person. Not a symbol, not a victim, not a slogan, not a protest chant, not a catalog entry, not a cause, not a cautionary tale, not a lesson in institutional failure, not an example of anything. A person. This biography attempts to recover her as one.

A word about what this biography does not do. It does not solve the mystery of Ana Mendieta's death. It does not claim to know whether she was pushed or whether she jumped or whether she fell. The evidence that exists is the evidence that was presented at Carl Andre's trial before Justice Alvin Schlesinger between January 29 and February 11, 1988, and the evidence was insufficient to convict him, and it is also insufficient to exonerate him, and the biographer is not a prosecutor or a defense attorney or a judge. What the biography does is present the evidence as fully and honestly as possible, note what the evidence shows and what it does not show, and allow the reader to reach whatever conclusion the evidence supports.

It does not treat Ana Mendieta as a saint. She was not a saint. She was a person who made extraordinary art and who also drank too much and who also had a temper and who also could be cruel to people who loved her and who also made choices that were self-defeating and who also struggled with the same contradictions that all people struggle with. The biography that turns its subject into a saint is as dishonest as the biography that turns her into a victim, and both are forms of erasure. A person can be brilliant and flawed. A person can be a victim of injustice and also the author of her own bad decisions. A person can deserve both sympathy and scrutiny. Ana Mendieta deserves both.

It does not treat Carl Andre as a monster. He may or may not have killed her. The biography presents the evidence and does not pretend to know what it cannot know. What it does do is examine the structures, of gender, of the art market, of institutional power, that ensured that Andre's career survived the accusation while Mendieta's legacy nearly did not. The structures are more important than the individual, because the structures are what allowed the individual outcome to occur, and the structures are what continue to produce similar outcomes in the art world and beyond.

And it does not treat the art world as a monolith. The art world is made up of individuals, curators, critics, gallerists, collectors, museum directors, artists, who made identifiable decisions about particular exhibitions and acquisitions and reviews, and those decisions, taken together, constitute the institutional response to Ana Mendieta's death and Carl Andre's acquittal. The biography names the decisions and the people who made them, not to shame them but to understand how institutional complicity works: not through conspiracy but through the accumulation of individual choices, each of which is defensible in isolation and devastating in aggregate.

Her full name was Ana María Mendieta Oti. She was born on November 18, 1948, in Havana, Cuba, to Ignacio Alberto Mendieta de Lizáur, an attorney, and Raquel Oti de Mendieta, daughter of another established Havana family. She had an older sister, Raquelin, who would be her companion in exile and her closest family member for the rest of her life. She had a younger brother, Ignacio, who joined the sisters in the United States with their mother in 1966. Her family was prominent (her great-uncle Carlos Mendieta had served as president of Cuba from 1934 to 1935), and the prominence would prove both a source of identity and a source of danger when the revolution came.

She left Cuba on September 11, 1961, at the age of twelve, as part of Operation Peter Pan, the Catholic Welfare Bureau program organized by Father Bryan O. Walsh of Miami in coordination with the United States State Department. She did not choose to leave. She did not want to leave. She was put on a plane by parents who believed they were saving her from a communist government that they feared would take their children from them, and the plane took her to Miami, and from Miami she and Raquelin were sent to Iowa, and in Iowa she would spend the next seventeen years of her life — in foster homes, in orphanages, in schools, at the university — before she moved to New York in 1978 and began the phase of her career that would make her one of the most important artists of the twentieth century.

She died at age thirty-six on September 8, 1985, after the fall from the thirty-fourth-floor window in New York City. The cause of death was blunt-force trauma from the fall. The manner of death was disputed, litigated, and never resolved to anyone's satisfaction.

Between those two dates, the departure from Havana and the fall from the window, she lived a life of extraordinary intensity, creativity, anger, love, loneliness, ambition, and art. The life is the subject of this book. The life has never been told in full. The telling begins in Havana, in 1948, in the house where she was born, in the country she was forced to leave, in the world she spent the rest of her life trying to return to.

We begin there. Not because beginnings explain everything, they do not, but because this particular beginning, this particular place, this particular family, this particular departure, shaped everything that followed in ways that the received narrative acknowledges in the abstract and has never examined in the concrete. The concrete is where the person lives. The concrete is what the biography is for.