Missing Mendieta

"Latino" art and where it comes from are two very different things.

By F. Lennox Campello

Which brings me to "Latino" art and artists, suddenly so in vogue and prevalent in our museums and media. But what is "Latino" art?

There is a hopelessness and yet a hopefulness in attempting to approach this term, perhaps due to its relevance in the DC area. The gross American simplification of grouping into one ethnic and cultural qualifier the nearly 30 New World nationalities and two European ones that currently make up the uniquely American term "Latin" or "Latino" is beyond me.

The New World Name Game

To complicate the issue, Portuguese people and their colonial offspring in Brazil are also included under this misused term. So why aren't Italians? Or are they? Argentineans are Latins, right? And a vast number of Argentineans are actually the descendants of Italian immigrants, and since the Roman Empire's Italian citizens were the original Latins, why are they out of the equation now? And don't even get me started about the many millions of people in Latin American countries of German, African, Asian and Middle Eastern ancestry. Under this uniquely American term, a blonde, blue-eyed Yank from upstate New York can be qualified as "Native American" provided that he or she can prove one-sixteenth Oneida blood, but the full-blooded Maya immigrant from Guatemala or Honduras cleaning your office or landscaping suburban yards is a "Latino"? Makes my head hurt.

"Vivification Of The Flesh (La Vivificacion De Le Carne)," 1983, by Ana Mendieta

Another way to show this is to look at the names of some of our area's best known artists of Latin-American ancestry to see what a rambling mix we are. We soon run into names like Jose Ruiz, Javier Cuellar, Gabriel Gross, Manuel Metz, Elena Maza, Nicolas Shi, Nestor Hernandez, Felicia Federman, Michael Bonfigli, Naul Ojeda, Raquel Partnoy, and my good friend Joe Shannon, born in Puerto Rico from a good-ole PR family!

Localizing Latino Art

Of the nearly two hundred art spaces, galleries, and other venues that make up our city's immense cultural tapestry, a handful focus their exhibitions on Latin American art and artists. Fondo del Sol, 2112 R Street, NW, was established in 1970 and is the second oldest art space of its kind in the U.S.

Directed by Marc Zuver, one of the most animated and talkative art directors in the Washington area, this nonprofit art museum that focuses on work related to Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as U.S. artists of Hispanic and Caribbean ancestry.

Another of my favorites is the Mexican Cultural Institute, 2829 16th Street, NW, one of the most beautiful settings of any art local venue. Located on the edge of Adams Morgan, the Center is housed in a magnificent four-story Italian-style mansion with elegant wall murals depicting Latin American independence heroes. In addition to a very nice gallery, almost every single day and night there are recitals, lectures and screenings.

The Shadowed Figure

But perhaps the most significant local "Latino" visual art event is being carefully prepared and researched by Olga Viso, a young Cuban-American woman, who is the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Hirshhorn Museum. She is currently organizing the first major retrospective of one of the most influential young American artists of the late 20th century, Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta (1948-1985).

In her very active and tragic short life, Mendieta built a body of work and an international art presence that although somewhat important, hasn't truly been fully studied and evaluated in depth. I believe that it will be through Viso's exhaustive research that Mendieta's life and works will establish Mendieta firmly as one of the key innovators of modern art at the turn of the century and raise her overall stature into the rarified upper crusts of the art world. Mendieta was born in Havana to a prominent Cuban family and was exiled to the United States in 1961 as part of the massive Catholic Church-sponsored children exodus known as the "Peter Pan Flights." Under this program, a tragic

Untitled Photograph from the Cosmetic Facial Variation Series (with stocking) by Ana Mendieta

In 1975, Mendieta began a series of works based on the silhouette of her body. Prior to that, she had concentrated on painting and performance, and it is through these "silhouette works" that the art world knows her best.

The works were new and innovative; the silhouette enabled Mendieta to remove herself from the actual artwork by creating the armature or mold for a surrogate figure that could then be transformed by fire, mud, and stones. Through her body impressions, the full-grown feminine essence of her womanhood was absent, but behind she left an outline in many forms and stages that traced her unseen body.

"Mendieta had a brief yet significant career," Viso says, "that subsequently influenced several generations of artists who also have worked with their bodies and explored themes associated with gender and identity."

In 1985 Mendieta married Carl André, a well-known Minimalist sculptor 13 years her senior. Later that year, in a tragic accident, Mendieta died after falling 34 flights from their apartment. Although André was accused, charged with and tried for the murder, he was acquitted of his young wife's death in February 1988.

Emerging From Shadows

Viso has been working since 2000, gathering the data, art, and paperwork that she will need to assemble the Mendieta retrospective. The exhibition is set to open sometime in 2003.

"We are extremely fortunate that Ana kept everything," says Viso, who was recently awarded the prestigious Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Getty Grant Program in Los Angeles. With the cooperation of Mendieta's family and estate, she has been granted unprecedented access to 10,000 documentary slides and photographs, years of correspondence, personal records, and other documents related to Mendieta's evolution and development as an artist.

Viso has also visited Cuba to research Mendieta's work, as the artist had tried to "recapture" her Cuban identity and had visited and performed in Cuba in 1981. It was there that Viso "rediscovered" residues of Mendieta's rock carvings along overgrown embankments near Varadero Beach (infamous as the exodus departure point of over two million Cubans) and Jaruco Park.

Within the next few months, Viso intends to conclude her research and will focus on the actual exhibition, which will also travel to the Whitney Museum in New York and two other TBD venues.

Viso's work will provide the first truly researched academic context into which Mendieta's work will be fully framed. It will remove it from the isolation into which it has been incorrectly subjugated and reconnect it to the artistic tides of her generation and contemporaries.

It is an intriguing twist of destiny that it took a young American of Cuban ancestry to illuminate the dreams, goals, and accomplishments of the young Cuban exile forced by fate to become an American, who rediscovered her Cuban roots through art and created an almost mythical modern art figure.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

F. Lennox Campello is the only son of Cuban exiles and the grandson of Galician immigrants to Cuba on his paternal side, a half-Scottish maternal grandmother immigrant to Cuba from the Canary Islands, and a Sicilian-born maternal gradfather who was adopted as a child by a Frenchman who then migrated to Cuba. In other words Campello is a mutt like the rest of you.

Photos courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and University of Wisconsin - La Crosse