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Dedication of the Ana Mendieta Gallery, film screening, and an exhibit of her works at the University of Iowa

Nov 18, 2022

10:00 AM - 06:00 PM

Visual Arts Building, E260 (Ana Mendieta Gallery)

107 River Street, Iowa City, IA 52246

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Ana Mendieta Universal Energy Exhibition 11/14/22 to 11/26/22 8:00am-8:00pm Film screening & special Reception with the Mendieta Family November 18,  2022 6:00PM

DEDICATION OF THE ANA MENDIETA GALLERY, FILM SCREENING, AND AN EXHIBIT OF HER WORKS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA

Gallery Opening Celebration and Screening of Ana Mendieta films: Friday, Nov. 18, 2022, 6–9 p.m., Art Building West and Visual Arts Building, University of Iowa.

Exhibition: Nov. 14–26, Ana Mendieta Gallery (E260), Visual Arts Building, University of Iowa.

The Sculpture and Intermedia Program at the School of Art and Art History, Vertical Cinema and the SAAH Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee are proud to invite you to the dedication of the new Ana Mendieta Gallery, with film screenings and a celebration of Ana’s Mendieta’s birthday. Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, the artist’s niece and film archivist for the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, will introduce the events. 

Universal Energy, an exhibit of 25 works by alum Ana Mendieta, is open to the public daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the Ana Mendieta Gallery (E260), Visual Arts Building, 141 N. Riverside Dr., lowa City, and will run from Nov. 14 to 26, 2022.  All the works in this exhibit were made when the artist lived in Iowa City in the late 1960s-early 1970s.

Mendieta earned her B.A. in art (1969), an M.A. in painting (1972) and an M.F.A in intermedia and video (1977) at the University of Iowa. Her work in Intermedia was pathbreaking in the development of performance art, photography, film, sculpture, and land art in the modern era. Creating a dialogue between nature and the body in a unique hybrid of form and documentation, Mendieta reestablished bonds with the land by making what she called Siluetas from rock, flowers, earth, and other natural elements. Her groundbreaking and internationally acclaimed earth-body works on identity and belonging remain profoundly relevant today.


Program for ANA MENDIETA GALLERY OPENING Nov. 18, 2022

6–7 p.m., 240 Art Building West, University of Iowa
Introduction by Raquel Cecilia Mendieta.
Ana Mendieta’s Film Screenings:
Sweating Blood, 1973 
Ana Mendieta Filmworks No. 14 
Ocean Bird (Washup), 1974 
Ana Mendieta Filmworks No. 25 
Grass Breathing, c. 1974
Ana Mendieta Filmworks No. 34 
Source, 1975 
Ana Mendieta Filmworks No. 44 
Butterfly, 1975
Ana Mendieta Filmworks No. 46

7:15-9 p.m. Ana Mendieta Gallery E260 Visual Arts Building, University of Iowa
Ana Mendieta Gallery Dedication, Ana Mendieta’s Birthday Celebration, and Universal Energy Reception
Light refreshments will be served.

For more information, please contact Isabel Barbuzza, School of Art and Art History, University of Iowa at isabel-barbuzza@uiowa.edu and madeleine-baer@uiowa.edu

ANA MENDIETA (b. 1948, Havana, Cuba-d. 1985, New York)
Ana Mendieta was born in Havana on Nov. 18, 1948. At the age of 12 Ana and her 15-year-old sister, Raquelin, left their family and Cuba in September 1961 for the United States in the Pedro Pan Operation, part of a mass exodus of more than 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban minors who were sent to the United States to escape political conflicts brought by the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The sisters were sponsored by the Catholic Welfare Bureau in Miami who sent them to the Catholic Charities in Dubuque, Iowa. There Mendieta lived different residential institutions and three sets of foster parents before Ana and Raquelin’s mother joined them in Iowa in February 1966.

Mendieta earned her B.A. in art (1969), an M.A. in painting (1972) and an M.F.A in intermedia and video (1977) at the University of Iowa.  Her work in Intermedia was pathbreaking in the development of performance art, photography, film, sculpture, and land art in the modern era. Creating a dialogue between nature and the body in a unique hybrid of form and documentation, Mendieta reestablished bonds with the land by making Siluetas from rock, flowers, earth, and other natural elements. Her groundbreaking and internationally acclaimed earth-body works on identity and belonging remain profoundly relevant today.
In the mid-1970s Mendieta started exhibiting internationally and regularly visiting New York, eventually moving there in 1978. In 1980 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and participated in exhibitions sponsored by the Cuban government, initiating a period of reconnection with her homeland. In 1983 she spent a year in Italy as the recipient of the Rome Prize, working in studio-based sculpture for the first time. From 1983 until her death in September 1985, Mendieta lived between Rome and New York.  The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York hosted Mendieta's first retrospective in 1987. 

Since her death, Mendieta’s art has been the focus of major books and many retrospective exhibitions including Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance (Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Des Moines Art Center and Miami Art Museum, Florida (2004); Ana Mendieta, Art Institute of Chicago (2011); Ana Mendieta in Context: Public and Private Work, De La Cruz Collection, Miami (2012). Ana Mendieta / Covered in Time and History at Bildmuseet, Umeå University, Sweden (2017); and La Tierra Habla (The Earth Speaks) at Galerie Lelong, New York (2019).
In 2009 Mendieta was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Cintas Foundation.

Mendieta's work is included in many major public collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva; Tate Collection, London; and the Nasher Sculpture Center.

Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to attend all University of Iowa–sponsored events. If you are a person with a disability who requires a reasonable accommodation in order to participate in this program, please contact in advance at