Rediscovering Ana Mendieta: the traveling Mendieta retrospective currently at the Hirshhorn Museum comes nearly 20 years after the artist's death. At the core of the show are photographs and little-seen films documenting her ritualistic, visually searing performances

Art in America, Nov, 2004 by Eleanor Heartney

It was at an A.I.R. panel discussion in late 1979 that Mendieta met Carl Andre. She also began to meet members of the expatriate Cuban community who rekindled her interest in revisiting her homeland. Her first opportunity to do so occurred in 1980 when she visited Cuba on a cultural exchange trip sponsored by a Cuban association in New York. She made seven trips over the next four years, during which time she initiated and elaborated an important new series, the Rupestrian sculptures. These were life size figures carved and painted on natural limestone, many of which were created with the support of the Cuban government. As documented in photographs here, these have a prehistoric look, bringing to mind ancient petroglyphs in the form of fertility figures. Unlike the Siluetas, which have no internal details, many of these generalized female forms emphasize breasts and genital areas, with a more or less explicit reference to precursors like the Venus of Willendorf. Often they were named after pre-Hispanic goddesses venerated by indigenous Cuban peoples like the Taino and Ciboney. Related works involved sand sculptures dug out of beaches or formed of wet sand. Over the years, those that survived were often accepted as authentic ritual objects to which locals added flowers, food and other offerings.

Mendieta also began to create similar works back home. The exhibition includes Maroya (Moon), 1982. This is a limestone and cement sculpture originally inserted into the ground of the garden of two Miami-based patrons. The figure-shaped cavity has a raw vaginal configuration, and periodically it was filled with gunpowder and ignited on nights with a full moon. Later dug up and preserved, it is presented here with traces of ash still visible in its surface.

As Maroya suggests, Mendieta had become increasingly interested in creating more durable works. Several proposals for permanent public works in Cuba came to naught. Back in the United States, she began creating figure-related sculptures out of materials like ficus roots, carved tree trunks, and sand and earth mixed with binder. Her "Totem Grove" series from 1984-85 consists of partially polished tree trunks into which blackened silhouettes have been burned. She also began to create drawings on bark paper, thick copey oak leaves and other natural materials.

The images in both drawings and sculptures consist of various schematic human forms, increasingly abstract and often filled with a spiral of lines. The exhibition includes a selection of these, which are ultimately much less satisfying than the documentation of the ephemeral performances, Siluetas and Rupestrian sculptures. Created for more conventional gallery presentation than those other works, they seem diminished by comparison.

Mendieta's reputation rests on those earlier works. The pre-Silueta performances, with their emphasis on blood, ritual and transformation, exist in dialogue with more recent works by artists like Jeanne Dunning, Andres Serrano and Kiki Smith, as well as Bruguera and Antoni. They also partake of the current interest in abjection, the grotesque and various revived forms of performance art (most notably Marina Abramovic's The House with the Ocean View at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York last year). Meanwhile, the lyrical beauty of the Siluetas and Rupestrian sculptures, with their emphasis on cycles of destruction and renewal, and their use of fire, earth and water, brings to mind works by artists like Bill Viola, Andy Goldsworthy and Cai Guo-Qiang.