Tracing Ana | By Haley Mlotek. How artist Ana Mendieta is unremembered.
In 1992, protesters stood outside the opening of the short-lived Guggenheim Museum Soho location with banners, asking, “Where is Ana Mendieta?” No one was looking for an answer—everyone knew where Ana Mendieta was. In September 1985, she died after falling out her apartment window under what can only be referred to as suspicious circumstances. Her husband, heralded artist Carl Andre, was tried and ultimately acquitted of murder, earning him a new sobriquet: “The O.J. of the Art World.” Since then, a significant amount of writing about Mendieta has focused solely on her death, and indeed, as someone who has only ever known Mendieta as deceased, I understand the impulse. The eerie circumstances—a fall after a lifelong fear of heights, her body left un-photographed by police after a career of photographing her own body—as well as the infuriatingly unresolved cause of death creates a compellingly dramatic and structurally tidy narrative.
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