Ana Mendieta and Carl Andre: duet of leaf and stone

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In keeping with their affinity at this time, the two artists planned two joint exhibitions for October 1982 at the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Florida, and the University of New Mexico's Art Museum in Albuquerque. In both cases, Andre's work was shown in an indoor gallery while Mendieta chose an outdoor site. For the Lowe Museum, she carefully planned a variety of four pieces incorporating plant materials native to Florida. Mother of All Things (also titled Arbol de la Vida (Tree of Life) in the brochure) consisted of a tripartite, shieldlike framework on which she trained vines and sphagnum moss. Mendieta then attached these "shields" to a tree on the museum grounds for a female-shaped topiary effect. Tallus Mater (Root Mother) consisted of a curved ficus root hung in the branches of another tree. A pathway of burnt handprints led through the grass, scorched by a branding iron traced from her own hand. Adopting an earlier title, Body Tracks, this piece alluded to her performances in which she drenched her arms in a mixture of red tempera and blood and then dragged them down the wall. She first documented Body Tracks in 1974, during her Iowa student days, and re-created it in April 1982 at Franklin Furnace in New York. The fourth work, Anima (Soul in Purgatory), continued her Silueta series with a gunpowder-charred female figure shaped by rocks on the ground.

Inside the Lowe Museum galleries, Andre showed a sampling of old and new sculptures. Early works such as Tau and Threshold from the Element series (1960/1971) and Equivalent I (1966/1969), made in firebricks, were re-created, as well as a representative metal floor piece, 144 Tin Square (1975), and more recent works. The press coverage does not connect the two artists as a couple, giving them roughly equal weight in reviews. Greater reader familiarity is assumed for Andre's work, while Mendieta's is put in the context of feminist goddess art, as well as earthworks. However, according to friends, Mendieta strongly objected to critic Helen Kohen's comment in the Miami Herald: "Without an Andre, there might never have been earthworks, or a Mendieta." (13)

She had become leery of comparison with Andre, to the extent that later the same month, the Albuquerque Journal reports the two are "companions who seldom exhibit jointly as they are doing here, the artists don't like their work to be compared. They don't think it is similar." (14) By this point, Mendieta began to bristle at the lack of subtlety and depth in the critical interpretation of her work. She had frequently allowed her work to be cast in the feminist or Latino context through thematic group exhibitions, which led to unidimensional pigeonholing. The opportunities offered by gender or ethnicity proved to be a double-edged sword. Now she realized the dangers of too close an association with Andre. While their work is aesthetically similar, Mendieta was frustrated by the critics' failure to draw distinctions between Andre's now-classic Minimalism and her departure from that standard. Andre connects identical, standard-size units of materials such as bricks or tin, which are arranged to reflect a Euclidean geometric sense of order. Mendieta has no such universal, mathematical concerns. She references her culture, her gender, and her own body. Both artists use natural materials, but Mendieta's are ephemeral. Her fabrication exudes the personal touch, literally charring her handprint into the grass.