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4,472 words · no email, no account
No. 049 · Art & Design · Visual Art
A Body Made of Earth
a biography of Ana Maria Mendieta Oti
What the book is
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.
At a glance
- Subject
- Ana Maria Mendieta Oti
- Shelf
- Art & Design · Visual Art
- Written by
- Inés Cabrera
- Chapters
- 19 across 191 pages
- Narrated by
- Imogen Vey
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
- Content notes
- domestic violence · suspicious death
Contents · 19 chapters
- 01The QuestionRead free
- 02The House in Havana3,950 words
- 03Operation Peter Pan3,848 words
- 04The Iowa Orphanages3,423 words
- 05The Foreign Girl3,185 words
- 06The University3,442 words
- 07The Blood Works3,750 words
- 08The Siluetas4,244 words
- 09The Return3,142 words
- 10The Feminist Art World3,062 words
- 11The Downtown Scene3,258 words
- 12The Cuban2,615 words
- 13Carl Andre2,411 words
- 14The Thirty-Fourth Floor3,092 words
- 15The Trial3,091 words
- 16The Closing of Ranks2,821 words
- 17Where Is Ana Mendieta?3,167 words
- 18The Earth-Body3,395 words
- 19Andre3,679 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- 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
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who 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.
02Is 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.
03Can 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.
04How long is it?
About 63,500 words, 19 chapters, 191 pages in the paperback.
05What 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.
06Does 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
This book deals with
- domestic violence
- suspicious death
Listed before you buy, not after.
