Week 3 selfie - Ana Mendieta

 

The corporality of her work reflects the rejection and suffering caused by racism, politics, violence, but also an exile. The latter was a key point in her personal life that will be projected in her work, since it was uprooted from her roots, from her parents, to take her to a country with a marked racist character at that time

Female Gaze: Art that Looks at What Women See | NYTIMES

“Today that may not sound so special, but then in those times it was incredibly important,” she said. “They created a shift, a change in perspective, from being the model, the person a painter is looking at, to being the painter herself.”

This phrase stands out to me because we often overlook how women challenged gender roles through art, transitioning from being the object of art to becoming creators themselves.

Ana Mendieta: Artist Who Pushed Boundaries | NYTimes

As an immigrant, Mendieta felt a disconnect in the United States. The trauma of being uprooted from her Cuban homeland as a girl would leave her with questions about her identity and make her more conscious of being a woman of color.

I chose this quote because it was the one that most resonated with me. When I moved to the United States, I felt the same disconnect that Mendieta did, and because this is such a different country culturally and in many other ways, it made me more aware of my identity as a woman of color.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing, Chapters 2+3 

 "This nakedness is not, however, an expression of her own feelings; it is a sign of her submission to the owner’s feelings or demands. (The owner of both woman and painting.) The painting, when the King showed it to others, demonstrated this submission and his guests envied him".

 "It is worth noticing that in other non-European traditions – in Indian art, Persian art, African art, Pre-Columbian art – nakedness is never supine in this way. And if, in these traditions, the theme of a work is sexual attraction, it is likely to show active sexual love as between two people, the woman as active as the man, the actions of each absorbing the other".

These two quotes appeared interesting to me because in the first quote, the author discusses how female nudity is not an expression of feelings but a show of submission, something that seems evident when you see it but at the time I had not been aware of it, female vulnerability becomes male power. I selected the second statement because I thought it was crucial to highlight the differences with other non-European civilizations and how they portrayed sexual attraction in both men and women in a more active manner.