The journey seeking sites and connections to renowned artist Ana Mendieta has been slow but rewarding. As the heat and humidity of summer persist, tainted with a haze of smoke from the millions of acres burning in Canada, I look for Ana’s voice in the present– how the artist would have responded to the earth burning and seeming to cave in on itself, the place that provides the substrate for Ana’s material usage. 

Mendieta’s work in Iowa began with exploring self and body– suddenly transforming into questioning this through means of the body of the earth; her Silueta’s began at Old Mans Creek, not far from her home in Iowa City. Integrating vibrant magenta velvet and flowers from off-site, the touch of color and material shaping her body conglomerates a sense of building oneself in the landscape. My quest to return to these sites, so many years later, not only proved difficult because of the shifted landscape but also because of the ownership of the landscape and the absence of how these sites were altered at the seam by Mendieta’s touch.  

To follow this quest, I am currently attempting to locate the sites of Mendieta’s performances and video pieces. Some of this work began in downtown Iowa City, then spread to the outskirts of town where her Silueta’s were formed. Her Moffitt Building Piece holds a completely different cityscape than what can be seen of the piece currently on view at the Stanley Museum of Art. This has transformed from an old building that used to be named Moffitt Building, now where the current Iowa City Public Library lives on Linn Street. Another was filmed at Iowa City’s Oakland Cemetery’s famed Black Angel, where Mendieta formed her Silueta on the concrete slab that lay in front of the angel. Landmarks such as these prove distinct in locating. However, as I move deeper into her Silueta’s further enveloped in nature, it is increasingly difficult to find exactly where the work was created.

As I locate more sites, I hope to create an interactive map detailing the site and take special note of the landscape and flora that actively participated in Mendieta’s work. I hope to link this to her pieces so one may take a tour of her work, viewing my documentation of the sites today and her work there. The contrast of the site then, to its altered and present state, speaks to the ephemerality of the artist’s work, how the pieces shifted and changed as a body does, over time and moving through life.