In the summer of 1985, Ana Mendieta was playing with gunpowder and a chainsaw. Just 5ft tall, the Cuban American artist worked outside her studio in Rome, trying to figure out the scale of a new commission for MacArthur Park, Los Angeles. Her idea was to cut up trees and burn the gunpowder directly into them, creating a totem \u201cgrove\u201d inspired by her recent trips to neolithic sites. It was a breakthrough of sorts \u2013 permanent, monumental work that built on her performance art \u2013 and in a photograph of her standing next to a test piece, Mendieta looks proud, excited.<\/p>\n
She had arrived in Italy two years earlier, after winning the prestigious Prix de Rome and a residency at its American Academy. She alienated half the staff, but fell in love with the city, driving like a local (right hand on the wheel, left middle finger out the window). Mendieta admired Roman women, mailing her friend, the film critic B Ruby Rich, a newspaper clipping of a pro-choice demonstration. \u201cShe said, \u2018Look, they\u2019re not like American women,\u2019\u201d remembers Rich. \u201c\u2018They\u2019re showing women butchered and dead from botched abortions. Look how much fiercer they are.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Ana Mendieta, Bird Run 1974. \u00a9 The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Licensed by Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. DACS 2026. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery and Alison Jacques, London<\/p>\n
The sculptor Marsha Pels became Mendieta\u2019s friend in Rome, though it wasn\u2019t easy. \u201cShe wanted me to take her side in everything,\u201d she tells me. Pels had befriended the academy\u2019s gatekeeper, letting him use her studio as a hair salon. \u201cAna didn\u2019t like him because he didn\u2019t treat her like a royal highness one day. We fought, and I\u2019d say, \u2018If he\u2019s cutting hair, then just don\u2019t come in.\u2019\u201d But she could also be very generous. \u201cWhen Ana was working with the trees, there was one I really liked, like a woman crossing her legs. I said, \u2018Can I have that?\u2019 and she said yes.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the evenings, Mendieta would mix a cocktail, or they\u2019d walk down the hill to Trastevere. Earlier that year she had married the minimalist artist Carl Andre. He was 49 to her 36 and world famous \u2013 and when he visited from New York he would join them. Not Pels so much, who disliked him, but sometimes Mendieta\u2019s friend Ida Panicelli, the curator of Italy\u2019s National Gallery of Modern Art, or fellow academician Christian Haub.<\/p>\n
Ima\u0301gen de Ya\u0301gul, 1973. \u00a9 The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Licensed by Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. DACS 2026. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery and Alison Jacques, London<\/p>\n
Panicelli recalls \u201cfantastic\u201d rows about art. \u201cThey were always drinking a lot of wine. I used to think of Ana as a volcano \u2013 very energetic and fun, but with [Andre] often arguing.\u201d With Haub, Mendieta loved to gossip. \u201cThere was lots of complaining about the neo-expressionists in New York,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
When Rome emptied out in August, Pels and Mendieta visited the island of Ponza \u2013 a last hurrah before Pels returned to America and Mendieta moved to another flat in Rome. Before that, she would fly to New York and clear her apartment, so that Pels could stay there. On Ponza, climbing a donkey track with a sheer drop to the Mediterranean, Mendieta had a panic attack. \u201cI turned to see Ana shaking and crying, \u2018I\u2019m an acrophobiac! I can\u2019t!\u2019\u201d Acrophobia is an extreme fear of heights. \u201cIt took an hour to calm her down.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pels thought of it often over the coming weeks, and especially after waiting two hours with a removal van outside Mendieta\u2019s Sixth Avenue apartment in New York on 9 September. When Mendieta failed to turn up, Pels left a note: \u201cWhere the hell are you?\u201d The answer was on page three of the New York Times the next day: Sculptor Accused of Pushing Wife Out Window To Death. Mendieta had fallen 33 storeys from Andre\u2019s apartment on Mercer Street.<\/p>\n
In less than 20 years of making art, Mendieta worked extraordinarily fast. She moved from painting to performance to earth works and sculpture, burning through the possibilities of each while asking the same questions. What is our relationship with nature? Which archetypes resonate across time? Where does energy come from and where does it go? She was interested in the body, decay, Cuba and exile, having been airlifted from Havana to Miami aged 12 as part of Operation Peter Pan, a joint CIA-Catholic church initiative.<\/p>\n
As a graduate at the University of Iowa, she filmed performance pieces that still feel startlingly contemporary. In Sweating Blood (1973), Body Tracks and Blood Writing (both 1974), Mendieta worked with buckets of cow\u2019s blood, letting it drip over her eyes, or painting with her hands or forearms on to a wall: the outline of a tree; the words SHE GOT LOVE.<\/p>\n
Ana\u2019s husband Carl Andre, who was accused of second-degree murder. Photograph: New York Daily News Archive\/Monica Almeida\/NY Daily News via Getty Images<\/p>\n
From 1973, Mendieta developed her Silueta series, often on field trips to Mexico, travelling with a plywood outline of her body strapped to her VW Beetle. To start with, she put herself into this work, covering her skin with flowers or feathers or mud. Later she burnt her silhouette into the ground or the sky, using gunpowder and fireworks. Her friend Joy Silverman, a gallery director, tells me she remembers Mendieta taking a roll of turf from her pickup truck after a picnic in a Washington DC cemetery. \u201cShe piled up the dirt and put the grass on it, so it would grow into a silueta.\u201d These works decayed but many were recorded on Super 8 film.<\/p>\n
There was more political art, such as Moffitt Building Piece and Rape Scene (both 1973). For Moffitt, Mendieta poured butcher\u2019s waste under her front door and across the pavement, photographing the non-reactions of passersby. For Rape Scene, inspired by the murder of a fellow student, she left her door open and let people find her bloody and bound, half naked. Then they\u2019d talk about it. It wasn\u2019t a subject she returned to: when galleries requested the stills in the 1980s, she\u2019d say she wasn\u2019t doing that kind of work any more, though she stood by it.<\/p>\n
N\u0303an\u0303igo Burial 1976 \u00a9The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Licensed by Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. DACS 2026. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery and Alison Jacques, London. Photo Alex Yudzon<\/p>\n
By the time she moved to New York in 1978, Mendieta was getting noticed. Her friend Natalia Delgado, a lawyer, heard from a college professor about \u201cthis very interesting Cuban woman in Iowa\u201d long before they met. By 1985 Mendieta was a rising star, which was what she and Andre argued about the night she died. In his 911 call he said, \u201cMy wife is an artist, and I\u2019m an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, uh, exposed to the public than she was. And she went to the bedroom, and I went after her, and she went out the window.\u201d<\/p>\n
Andre, who died<\/a> aged 88 in 2024, changed his account of what happened at least twice. He was in the room, then he wasn\u2019t. They had both been drinking before she fell at 5.29am. But you won\u2019t hear anything about that in Tate Modern\u2019s upcoming exhibition, or from Mendieta\u2019s estate, which is managed by her niece Raquel Cecilia Mendieta. After 40 years of having her art seen in the context of her death, they are firmly anti-biography. They find the books (Robert Katz\u2019s 1990 pulpy but forensic Naked By the Window), the true-crime podcasts (Helen Molesworth\u2019s 2022 Death of an Artist), even the protests against Andre\u2019s exhibitions unhelpful, reducing Mendieta to a victim. A forthcoming Amazon TV dramatisation of Katz\u2019s book, starring America Ferrara, is a new problem.<\/p>\n Untitled Silueta Series 1976. \u00a9The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Licensed by Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. DACS 2026. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery and Alison Jacques, London<\/p>\n I spoke to 10 people close to Mendieta and they, too, were frustrated: none of them liked Molesworth\u2019s podcast. But 41 years on, there was still outrage and anger towards Andre, his supporters and a trial they felt was a travesty. The window in Andre\u2019s apartment was high \u2013 chest height for Mendieta \u2013 with no footprints on the sill. Evidence that she was planning to divorce him was ruled inadmissible in court. People who were friends with both wouldn\u2019t talk to the police, or sided with Andre. The artist Frank Stella paid Andre\u2019s $250,000 bail and the defence later portrayed Mendieta as a hot-headed Latina, whose art was evidence of suicidal tendencies. \u201cIt was explicitly racist,\u201d Rich says. \u201cAna was a crazy Cuban drunk who flew out the window. It was completely nuts.\u201d<\/p>\n But for Mendieta\u2019s family, this just gets in the way. \u201cHaving to speak for Ana all the time,\u201d says Raquel Cecilia, \u201cit shocks me how much I have to say, \u2018Why are you sensationalising her? Would you do that with Rothko [who died by suicide]?\u2019 Ana took up space: [She\u2019d say] \u2018I\u2019m not a \u2018woman artist\u2019, I\u2019m an artist.\u2019 She didn\u2019t want these labels. But is it because she\u2019s a woman?\u201d<\/p>\n Everyone agrees on one thing: the late 70s and early 80s were an exhilarating time to be an artist in New York. Marsha Pels was a welder by day, a sculptor by night and a pal of Louise Bourgeois, taking the French artist dumpster-diving and to S&M shops (for materials, of course). Rent was cheap and grants were plentiful. B Ruby Rich wrote for the Village Voice and managed a $4m film fund for New York State. \u201cThere was lots of mixing,\u201d says Haub. \u201cPainters, sculptors, composers, dancers, poets, writers, critics, historians and musicians. In the 70s, collectors had not achieved their disproportionate influence. Everyone saw everything, in person.\u201d<\/p>\n Untitled 1972 \u00a9 The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Licensed by DACS<\/p>\n The abstract expressionists and minimalists, artists such as Stella, Donald Judd, Richard Serra, were making way for more conceptual, performance-based and feminist art. There was new interest in work from Latin America. One of the first people Mendieta looked up was the Argentine artist Liliana Porter, who recalls: \u201cThere were people coming to New York from different countries, and you felt there were so many artists better than yourself \u2013 you had to think and rethink the work. That was exciting.\u201d Mendieta stayed in her Tribeca loft, borrowing a fur-lined raincoat.<\/p>\n Another person Mendieta called was the painter Dotty Attie, who suggested she apply to the all-female AIR gallery after meeting her in Iowa. \u201cWe had a dinner for a lot of people there, she showed me her work and I really liked it,\u201d says Attie. Mendieta was accepted in 1978 and set to work, manning reception, painting ceilings, proposing shows. \u201cWe all did everything,\u201d says Attie. \u201cThat was important.\u201d<\/p>\n The artist Juan S\u00e1nchez met Mendieta at the opening of her first AIR show in November 1979: \u201cThe place was crowded and they all wanted to talk to Ana. But that evening [the painter] Leon Golub threw a party at his loft and I chatted with her on the couch.\u201d They met again at a group show. \u201cShe looked at my paintings and said, \u2018Oh, you\u2019re working with Taino petroglyphs [prehistoric Caribbean carvings]? Me too.\u2019 We hit it off.\u201d<\/p>\n Untitled, n.d. Wood 30x8x7in. (76.2 x 20.3 x 17.8cm). Photograph: \u00a9 The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Licensed by Artists Right Society (ARS), New York \/ DACS, London \/ Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery<\/p>\n Sanchez\u2019s parents were Puerto Rican and the two artists spoke fluent Spanglish. They would meet at Mendieta\u2019s place: \u201cIt was a one-room apartment, half studio, half living space. She\u2019d be playing Cuban music and show me what she was working on. At one point, it was her leaf drawings and figuring out what type of leaf was more resistant. She sealed some in acetate and my argument was, \u2018It\u2019s natural. If you preserve it, it\u2019s like frozen food.\u2019 But many of them still exist.\u201d Mendieta\u2019s friend Joy Silverman saved one when her house burned down in last year\u2019s LA fires.<\/p>\n Sanchez was due to have lunch with Mendieta the day she died. \u201cShe never showed up \u2026 We went back to our friends\u2019 apartment to see if she\u2019d called.\u201d Panicelli recalls that \u201cthe news was like an earthquake\u201d. The trial would not take place for another two years, but in 1985 what her friends knew was this: on 7 September, Mendieta and Andre had dinner with another couple, then stayed up watching TV. Mendieta had recently learned that Andre had been unfaithful and was collecting evidence (phone bills, letters) for a divorce: she discussed this on a call with Natalia Delgado the same evening, and planned to confront him. When the police arrived, the bedroom was a mess. The window was high on the wall and there were no footprints on the sill. A doorman had heard a woman shouting, \u201cNo, no, no!\u201d followed by a sound \u201clike an explosion\u201d.<\/p>\n The art world split. Stella paid Andre\u2019s bail and the sculptor Claes Oldenberg loaned him a flat. Delgado was shocked by how many people looked the other way. \u201cThere were friends who didn\u2019t want to get involved, because they perceived Carl as the more important artist. That was terrible.\u201d Pels says Mendieta\u2019s death made her a feminist: \u201cI didn\u2019t want to identify with feminism until I saw the art world stand up with this murderer.\u201d After the police recorded scratches on Andre\u2019s face, the artists who\u2019d had dinner with him earlier said there had been none. The following day, they retracted.<\/p>\n double quotation markI didn\u2019t want to identify with feminism until I saw the art world stand up with this murderer<\/p>\n Rich was at the Toronto film festival. \u201cI came back to the news on my answer machine: \u2018Can you believe it? Carl Andre threw his wife out the window.\u2019\u201d Was that Rich\u2019s first thought too? \u201cIt\u2019s not my thought, it\u2019s my absolute conviction. There\u2019s a lot of proof, but the art world boys gave him a lot of money, and they hired detectives on both sides of the Atlantic and suppressed a lot of evidence.\u201d She had never liked Andre. \u201cHe was such a macho guy in his very quiet, \u2018who, me?\u2019 way. He slept with almost every quote unquote feminist in the art world, so a ton of them were on his side somehow.\u201d A friend at MoMA told her the gallery got calls from Andre collectors soon after his arrest. \u201cThey called to ask, \u2018Buy or sell?\u2019 It\u2019s all about the Benjamins, as the song goes.\u201d<\/p>\n While Mendieta\u2019s friends pushed for a trial, they found ways of keeping her work in the conversation. Panicelli recommended it for every exhibition panel she sat on. She and Raquel, Mendieta\u2019s sister, packed up the studio in Rome. \u201cEverything was ready for her move,\u201d says Panicelli. \u201cThe only thing outside the boxes was my little watercolour.\u201d She had painted it for the couple as a wedding present, Andre floating Buddha-like in the sky while his new wife threw stones.<\/p>\n Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, Ana\u2019s niece and goddaughter, working on an untitled installation of Ana\u2019s work at the Museo de Arte Contempor\u00e1neo de Castilla y Le\u00f3n in Le\u00f3n, Spain, January 2024. Photograph: Anne Wernikoff\/New York Times\/Redux\/eyevine<\/p>\n A memorial gathering on Park Avenue was well attended and chaotic, testament to Mendieta\u2019s gift for connecting with disparate groups \u2013 the Latinas, the feminists, the bigwigs, the students. \u201cIt was a pretty interesting crowd,\u201d says Sanchez. \u201cI knew who she didn\u2019t like. Carl Andre was there and her family were very upset, but they decided to go ahead.\u201d The artist Liliana Porter wasn\u2019t able to go but also noted the new hangers-on: \u201cSuddenly a lot of people who didn\u2019t like Ana were her friends.\u201d<\/p>\n Rich, the artist Nancy Spero and Raquel were the driving forces behind a powerful New Museum retrospective in November 1987, which closed a week before the trial. Rich published a furious essay in the Village Voice, calling out the venality of the art world. \u201cIs this the first postfeminist murder case?\u201d she wrote. \u201cFor many of the women who came of age with the minimalists, brotherhood is outweighing sisterhood.\u201d Marsha Pels wrote to thank her, and when she later testified against Andre found that the threat of the minimalist brotherhood was real. \u201cMy dealer got a call to say, \u2018Marsha is never going to show in New York again.\u2019 And I didn\u2019t, for 15 years.\u201d<\/p>\n Untitled, 1977. Photograph: \u00a9 The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Licensed by DACS<\/p>\n As a child, Mendieta led a privileged life in Cuba. Her great-uncle Carlos had been president and her father was a well-connected lawyer. The family lived between a townhouse in Havana and her grandmother\u2019s beach house at Varadero, with a bell on the porch to call the children in from the sea. Her cousins remember Mendieta burying them in the sand, giving them big breasts to make them laugh, a kid\u2019s version of her later work. Some of her best siluetas deliberately recalled this \u2013 imprints carved into a Florida beach in 1981, angled to let the tide from Cuba wash in and out.<\/p>\n Untitled (Leaf drawing), c1984 ink drawing on leaf, 9 1\/2 x 4 inches (24.1 x 10.2 cm). Photograph: Michael Bodycomb 2012\/Ana Mendieta<\/p>\n After Castro\u2019s revolution in 1959, the girls\u2019 Catholic schools closed and Mendieta\u2019s father was jailed for collaboration with the CIA. Ana and Raquel, then 12 and 15, were flown with thousands of other children to start a new life without their parents. Or, as Pels puts it, \u201cThey were somewhat wealthy and important, and then they were shipped off to Mudfuck, Iowa, and put in a nunnery.\u201d<\/p>\n The girls moved between orphanages, reform school and foster homes. It was their first experience of racism. \u201cAna was dark,\u201d says Porter. \u201cImagine Iowa, where everybody was blond. She always said, \u2018I decided I was going to become an artist or a criminal.\u2019\u201d Mendieta\u2019s niece, Raquel Cecilia, says: \u201cThey didn\u2019t speak English. You\u2019re going to have to learn quickly to be like the other girls, and she did. She was able to have boyfriends and go to dances, have all those teenage experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n Delgado\u2019s family had left Cuba around the same time, and the two women bonded over their split identities. \u201cOur mothers tried to set us up with the children of people they knew in Cuba, and that never worked. My mother sent me a pink turtleneck and Ana said, \u2018Your mother has not figured out that you\u2019re an adult.\u2019\u201d On nights out, Mendieta clashed with cab drivers and waitresses who did not meet her standards. (Rich says she once called an art critic friend to yell after a lukewarm review.)<\/p>\n After the travel ban lifted in 1977, Mendieta became a founding member of the Circulo de Cultura Cubana, organising exchanges for artists and taking an American group in 1981. \u201cShe said that had been a mistake, because she got fed up with how they behaved,\u201d says Rich. \u201cTheir entitlement \u2013 the hotel wasn\u2019t nice enough, the food wasn\u2019t good enough.\u201d<\/p>\n Mendieta was full of plans for Cuba, starting with her carvings in the limestone Jaruco caves outside Havana \u2013 the Esculturas Rupestres (1980-85), inspired by petroglyphs. In footage of her 1981 trip, she is presented with an orchid by schoolchildren and looks ready to faint with joy. At 32, she also looks like one of them. \u201cI think it\u2019s why children loved her,\u201d says Raquel Cecilia, who was taught art by her at Henry Sabin elementary school, Iowa City. \u201cShe was playful and small. She taught me to take care of my work: \u2018Put that in a drawer, it\u2019s important.\u2019 And she loved children but she didn\u2019t want to be a mother. She said that her children were my mother\u2019s children.\u201d<\/p>\n Ida\u2019s husband Carl at his 1978 exhibition at Whitechapel Art Gallery. \u00a9Hulton-Deutsch Collection\/CORBIS\/Corbis via Getty Images<\/p>\n Mendieta worked best alone, which made Delgado\u2019s trip to Rome in spring 1985 \u201ca little stressful. Ana had got going on the tree trunks and was really into it. She said, \u2018Figure out what you\u2019re going to do during the day. I\u2019m not going to entertain you.\u2019\u201d Mendieta handed her a book of Roman walks, a sandwich and packed her off. \u201cOne day she got mad because I wanted a dessert with fresh cream, and she said, \u2018I wouldn\u2019t, it\u2019s not in the refrigerator.\u2019 Well, I got so sick. She had to call around for a doctor and she was very unsympathetic. At the time I was pissed but in retrospect, it made me laugh. I was wasting her precious time.\u201d<\/p>\n On the first day of his trial for second-degree murder, 29 January 1988, Andre asked for the jury to be dismissed. In New York state, it is the defendant\u2019s right to be tried without a jury, and the joke went that he had gone minimalist even in this. He asked his friends to stay away, too, but Mendieta\u2019s supporters packed the prosecution side of the supreme court room \u2013 among them her mother, sister, Rich, Sanchez, Panicelli, Pels and Delgado.<\/p>\n There was much that could not be used in court, chiefly Mendieta\u2019s plan to divorce him, which was ruled hearsay. The defence found that the doorman who heard a scream had once suffered from auditory hallucinations, and milked it.<\/p>\n Panicelli had moved to New York only three months earlier to edit Artforum magazine, and on a snowy day testified to Mendieta\u2019s significance as an artist. Andre\u2019s lawyer \u201ctried to make me a lousy witness, because my English wasn\u2019t perfect. He would move to the back of the room, so I was forced to say, \u2018Excuse me, can you repeat?\u2019\u201d Andre sat blank-faced, wearing overalls and scanning his newspapers \u2013 the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times. \u201cHe carried his newspapers all the time,\u201d says Panicelli, \u201ceven to their wedding.\u201d<\/p>\n Moffitt Building Piece, 1973. Super 8 mm film transferred to HD digital media, color, silent; 3 min. 17 sec. Photograph: \u00a9 The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Licensed by Artists Right Society (ARS), New York \/ DACS, London \/ Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery<\/p>\n What shocked Mendieta\u2019s friends was the ruthless way Andre\u2019s lawyer, Jack Hoffinger, interpreted her art as the expression of a death wish. \u201cHe painted her as a woman doing voodoo things, who was a suicidal character,\u201d says Panicelli. \u201cI felt even if [Andre] didn\u2019t kill her, he killed her during the trial.\u201d Hoffinger argued that a woman who blew things up and buried herself was dangerous and out of control. \u201cThis was a woman who didn\u2019t believe the traffic lights when it was her turn to cross,\u201d says Sanchez. \u201cEven if it was one direction, she looked both sides. She was very disciplined, a vegetarian who ran every morning.\u201d<\/p>\n As well as the lack of people prepared to say that the relationship was combustible, sometimes physically, Rich thinks the clinching evidence was a neighbour who testified that he had heard nothing. \u201cHe was a surprise witness,\u201d Rich says, added by the defence. When the prosecution went to counter-examine him, \u201che had mysteriously flown back to Hong Kong.\u201d<\/p>\n The judge gave his verdict on 11 February 1988: \u201cThe evidence has not satisfied me beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty.\u201d Panicelli was in a meeting when she got a call from the district attorney, Elizabeth Lederer. \u201cShe said, \u2018I don\u2019t want you to know from the papers tomorrow. I want to tell you that we lost.\u2019 She was almost in tears, and she said, \u2018I wish I had known Ana. She must have been a fantastic person.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Untitled, 1973. \u00a9The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Licensed by Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. DACS 2026. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery and Alison Jacques, London<\/p>\n The lawyer in Delgado thinks the case could have been better prosecuted but understands why Hoffinger was cynical in his defence. \u201cThat she had suicidal tendencies, and her art was about smashing into the earth. That\u2019s bullshit. But you want to get your client off, so you throw a lot of things at the wall and hope that something will stick.\u201d What else did Andre have? \u201cAll I wanted was revenge,\u201d Delgado says, \u201cbut he paid a heavy price. He was really tarred by it, and appropriately so.\u201d Andre continued to exhibit but became a more isolated figure.<\/p>\n double quotation markAna said feminism was a white women\u2019s movement, she rejected the idea of borders, of the \u2018white cube\u2019 gallery<\/p>\n The important thing was that the family inherited Mendieta\u2019s work, which might legally have gone to her husband. \u201cA lawyer friend talked to [Andre] and convinced him that it would look good \u2013 and be consistent with his approach that Ana committed suicide \u2013 if he gave the art as condolence,\u201d says Delgado. \u201cThe reason that was so important is I knew the argument that night was about who was a better artist. She kept saying, \u2018Look, I have a trajectory and I\u2019m significantly younger.\u2019 He was furious with her for various things. But one of the things he wanted to accomplish is \u2026 he wanted to cut off her opportunity to be known as an artist.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1992, Mendieta\u2019s friend Joy Silverman staged a protest at Guggenheim Soho, a new gallery showing Andre\u2019s work. She made T-shirts with Mendieta\u2019s face on them and led a funeral march with the Women\u2019s Action Coalition. \u201cOne of the artists made a banner: \u2018Carl Andre is at the Guggenheim, Donde esta Ana Mendieta?\u2019 Then I threw on a nice jacket and Raquel [Mendieta] walked in with me. We tossed Ana\u2019s photo all over his artwork, and the guards thought it was a performance.\u201d In 2017 Silverman protested again at an Andre retrospective in LA (\u201cI wanted Ana to have a presence\u201d), and others have led dozens of actions: \u201ccry-ins\u201d at a Berlin gallery, blood spills<\/a> in New York, a 2016 march on Tate Modern (\u201cOi, Tate, we\u2019ve got a vendetta \/ Where the fuck is Ana Mendieta?\u201d went the chant).<\/p>\n It\u2019s a moot point whether her work, or that of her generation, ever faded from view. For Marsha Pels, there was a definite late-1980s backlash. \u201cFeminism was just another ism that had to be stepped on. It\u2019s the stupid way that art trends work: \u2018They got their due, let\u2019s forget about them for a while.\u2019\u201d She remembers doing an event with an influential critic in the 00s, and when she came into the room they said, \u201cMarsha Pels! You look good, I thought you were dead.\u201d Later the critic got ill and Pels was tempted to say, \u201cHey! You look bad, I thought you were dead \u2026 I didn\u2019t, but Ana would have,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Racquelin (left), Ana\u2019s sister, testifies at Carl Andre\u2019s murder trial in New York, February 1988. Photograph: AP<\/p>\n If there was a moment for Mendieta protests, her niece Raquel Cecilia thinks it has passed. \u201cHow is she overlooked if she\u2019s in all these art history books and museum shows? She never was forgotten. People love to do that, right? To take an icon to become their voice.\u201d Mendieta only cared about the art, she says. \u201cShe said feminism was a white women\u2019s movement, she rejected the idea of borders, of the \u2018white cube\u2019 gallery. She wanted her work to be received in an open way.\u201d That said, she would have been thrilled at sharing Tate Modern with a Frida Kahlo exhibition this summer. \u201cShe\u2019d have been bragging. Kahlo was one of the few artists she really admired, and she went to her house [in Mexico City] whenever she could.\u201d<\/p>\n At an AIR gallery party in 1979 (\u201cDress as your favourite artist\u201d), Mendieta came as Kahlo, complete with monobrow. Louise Bourgeois came as herself. Pels was meant to be there, but Bourgeois had given her invitation to someone else. What is striking about Mendieta\u2019s contemporaries, now in their 70s and 80s, is how many are still hard at work. Sitting in her Brooklyn loft, Pels shows me her hands, which after six operations resemble the claws of Bourgeois\u2019 later years: \u201cLouise had these bumps.\u201d<\/p>\n A protest at a Carl Andre show at London\u2019s Tate Modern, 2016. Photograph: Jade Ang Jackman<\/p>\n What would Mendieta, who would have been 77 this summer, be doing now? \u201cThe early work is so brilliant,\u201d says Pels, \u201cbut it laid the groundwork, pun intended, for everything else. She\u2019d be making monumental art, applying for [commissions in] cities.\u201d She was just getting started, say Rich and Haub, and people underestimated her ambition. She planned to revisit early pieces, Raquel Cecilia says. \u201cShe wanted to make all the images lifesize, much bigger.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2014, Raquel Cecilia started to digitally restore Mendieta\u2019s Super 8 films. Her aunt leapt from the screen \u2013 in colour, in black and white \u2013 the technology revealing new layers of detail, the beauty and solitary effort of the work. A new print of one of them, Bird Run (1974), will be shown for the first time at Tate Modern. Mendieta appears at the end of a beach in Mexico, her body covered in white feathers, and begins to sprint towards the camera, a dot becoming a bird becoming a blur.<\/p>\n