Body Tracks

Change and transformation characterise Ana Mendieta’s life and work. Born in Havana, Cuba in 1948, she was sent with her sister, Raquelín, to the United States at the age of twelve as part of Operation Peter Pan, where 14,000 children were secretly taken from Cuba between 1960 and 1962. Her adolescence was spent in foster care and institutions in Iowa, where she was separated from her family, language and home. It was there that she studied painting at the University of Iowa. The impact of this early displacement echoes throughout her practice. Her work reflects a longing for nature and connection, and an effort to reconnect with her country, which she pursued in a literal sense: throughout her life, she collected objects from places she felt bonded to, believing, as her sister Raquelín later recalled, that such objects carried a charge, the vibration of the place from which they came.

From the early 1970s until her death in 1985, Mendieta worked across performance, photography, film and sculpture. She repeatedly returned to fundamental questions, such as the body’s connection to land, the imprint of absence, and the cosmologies and beliefs of both the Afro-Caribbean religion Santería and the Taíno, the Indigenous Arawak-speaking people of the Caribbean. For Mendieta, earth, blood and fire were alive. As she said in 1984, I’m not interested in the formal qualities ofmy materials, but their emotional and sensual ones.’¹As cited in Emily LaBarge, The Paris Review, March 8, 2019. Accessed 7 August, 2026:https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/03/08/ana-mendieta-emotional-artist/

‘Blood is elemental. It flows within the body as the most immediate sign of life. Its presence outside the body indicates injury or violence. In Mendieta’s work, blood’s vitality and threat are woven together within a single gesture or image’– Natasha Bullock

The Silueta Series, 1973–80, of temporary body-earth sculptures evolved directly from her years in Iowa, where she once asked fellow students to glue blades of grass across her naked body while lying face down on the ground. She wanted her body to appear as one with the lawn on which she lay. During her travels through Mexico and the broader Americas, she used mud, sand, fire, flowers and gunpowder to mould or create silhouettes of her own body into soil, sand, rock and grass. This included the first Silueta, in which she was scattered with white flowers, to later imprints traced into riverbanks and shorelines. The remaining silhouettes of her body were left to be reclaimed by weather, tide or flame. Mendieta said her work was grounded in the conviction that a single, cosmic force connects all living things, physical objects, space and time.

Another major work by Mendieta is Body Tracks, 1974, which she created and revisited throughout the mid-1970s. In this performative work, Mendieta stands in grey trousers against a wall covered with a silk cloth, arms raised overhead. Blood is elemental. It flows within the body as the most immediate sign of life. Its presence outside the body indicates injury or
violence. In Mendieta’s work, blood’s vitality and threat are woven together within a single gesture or image. As the performance unfolds, she drags her arms downwards, tracing two long vertical lines down the wall with a paint blood mixture as she folds at the waist and sinks to a crouch, bowing her head to the floor.

The work, recently acquired by the NGV with the generous support of the NGV Foundation, includes eight photographic images documenting the piece. Each frame shows the same viewpoint and red background, with the only variation being the body’s decreasing height and the elongating streaks above it. No single panel displays the entire work; the descent is understood as a continuous process across the sequence. In this context, blood acts as a material with its own physical properties. The composition, featuring two symmetrical tracks tapering into a huddled form, has a formal elegance.

Mendieta’s reputation grew steadily throughout her career, though it has taken forty years of sustained critical attention to reach this moment. Her work was the subject of major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum in New York City in 2004 and the Hayward Gallery in London in 2013. Today, she is widely recognised as a foundational figure in twentieth-century feminist body art and land art. The Tate Modern retrospective, which closes in January 2027, was produced in partnership with The Estate of Ana Mendieta and gathers more than 120 works arranged thematically around locations significant to her life, including newly remastered films, early student paintings and drawings, and the studio-based sculptures she made in Rome after receiving the Prix de Rome fellowship in 1983. The exhibition treats her practice as a radical inquiry into land, exile and the body’s relationship with both.

Mendieta developed an uncompromising and visionary body of work centred on disappearance, with marks designed to be washed away, burned out, or dissolved by the weather. As she wrote in an artist statement:

‘… I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body. Having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence, I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast out from the womb (Nature). My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the Universe. It is a return to the maternal source.’ ²John Perreault, ‘Earth and fire: Mendieta’s body of work’, in Ana Mendieta: A Retrospective, ed. Petra Barreras del Rio and Perreault, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1988, p 10. Quote fact-checked and updated by The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC.

For Mendieta, disappearance was not loss. Her work expressed an emotional, bodily desire to stay connected to what had been taken from her.

Natasha Bullock is NGV Senior Curator, Photography.

The NGV warmly thanks the NGV Foundation for acquiring Ana Mendieta’s Body Tracks 1974 for the NGV Collection.

This essay was first published in NGV Magazine | Issue 60 Sep-Oct 2026.

Notes