Right now at London’s Tate Modern, there is a single room in which select works from late University of Iowa alumna Ana Mendieta are displayed on a wall directly opposite the multi-paneled painting, Conservatory (Portrait of Frida Kahlo) (1988), by late University of Iowa alumna Miriam Schapiro. And the Iowa connections don’t end there.
Hanging in the same exhibit is the Frida Kahlo painting Self Portrait with Loose Hair (1947), which was previously owned by the late Louise Noun, co-founder of the Iowa Women’s Archives and a collector of artworks by female artists. In order to fund the archive, she sold the painting in 1991 for $1.5 million.
This Iowa-tied trio of women’s works can be found within the exhibit Frida: The Making of an Icon, which reflects on Kahlo’s life and impact and runs from June 25 to Jan. 3, 2027. For Iowans, however, the focal point lies in a separate, concurrent exhibit.
The Tate Modern — one of the largest and most distinguished art museums in the world — is featuring an in-depth exhibition on the Cuban-born, Iowa-raised multidisciplinary artist, Ana Mendieta. Running from July 15 to Jan. 17, 2027, and simply titled Ana Mendieta, the show displays her popular works together with films, paintings and sculptures that have never before been shown in the U.K.
Nature is a major through line in Mendieta’s work. Valentine Umansky, one of the exhibit’s curators, explains in the audio guide, “Our hope as curators is that you will feel, like we did, the connection that Ana developed with nature.”
This isn’t difficult. Stepping into the exhibit, daylight beams into the narrow windows overlaid by thick lattices of concrete, illuminating photographs of her Esculturas Rupestres (Rupestrian Sculptures), made among limestone rocks in Cuba. Displayed nearby, Yemaya Gifts is a recreation of Mendieta’s 1982 earth-body sculpture, composed of sand and mushroom corals; it’s meant to signify human unity with the earth.
Even the smell of trees and damp leaves lingers: Old Westbury, a recreation of Mendieta’s indoor forest installation, brings that environment and its accompanying scents into the gallery space.
At age 12, Mendieta moved from Cuba to Dubuque as a refugee in 1961, and it was in Iowa that she became an artist. She studied at the University of Iowa, earning a BA and an MA in painting. She also earned an MFA in intermedia at Iowa, where she was taught by the late German-American artist, Hans Breder, founder of the intermedia program there.
Elsa Collinson, Assistant Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, said Mendieta’s studies under Breder were transformational for the artist.
“The intermedia program broke down these distinctions between painting and sculpture, and had this kind of interdisciplinary approach,” Collinson said. “It was also grounded in time-based practices, like performance, but also other ways of working with time. I think that’s something we see throughout her work from that point onwards.”
As her art evolved, so did Mendieta’s political activism, both within and alongside her work. Her earth-body Silueta series is defined by the often-subtle suggestion of her body’s trace, imbuing it with feminist implications regarding the presence and representation of one’s body in their work. She also explicitly touches on the struggles of being a non-white female artist, as displayed in her self-penned opening statement from the exhibition catalogue Dialectics of Isolation (1980).
Mendieta is known to have admired Frida Kahlo — hence why pieces from her Silueta series are also displayed in Frida. Kahlo depicted feminism in her own way, whether painting herself struggling with fertility or donning her husband’s suit. Schapiro, too, explored these themes in her work and founded the Feminist Art Program at CalArts alongside Judy Chicago.
Mendieta’s presence at the Tate Modern has slowly grown. In 2020, the museum acquired 12 of Mendieta’s film works, making it the largest holder of her film works of any institution. This followed an initial acquisition of a group of photographs by Mendieta in 2009.
“With this acquisition, there’s been a kind of building of interest around her work at Tate,” Collinson explained. “I think there was also a sense that in doing this exhibition now, her work might be understood differently in our current context, partly because of the growing ecological awareness. Although Ana wouldn’t have used the same language that we do now — she had her own language for describing her works and their relationship with land and nature — it nevertheless resonates quite a lot with our thinking in ecological terms and around the environment at the moment.”
Much of the work in Ana Mendieta was created in Iowa. Blood + Feathers, for example, is a film in which Mendieta coats herself in cow’s blood and chicken feathers on the banks of Old Man’s Creek, pondering metamorphosis. Just southwest of Iowa City, this creek was a recurring location in her work; Tate curator Mike Wellen even visited the site to better connect with it.
“Old Man’s Creek provided a unique, secluded space for her to try out these experiments in the landscape, and through the different seasons as well. Using the riverbanks in the summer, or using the kind of snow and ice to form silhouettes in the winter — it really brings to life that landscape,” Collinson said.
Mendieta’s earth-body works made only minuscule traces on the land, aided by her non-extractive, regenerative artistic practices. In contrast, the artist — who died under deeply suspicious circumstances in 1985, after just 36 years on Earth — left profound marks in the fields of performance art, feminism and environmentalism. Her legacy is still potent, from Iowa City to New York City, Havana, Cuba to London, England.
