Who Is Ana Mendieta? back

She's an iconoclastic Cuban artist originally dispatched to America by her parents aged twelve in 1961 to avoid what they supposed were the last few years of Castro's regime. She and her sister went through multiple foster parents and a fistful of nuns before Ana graduated at the University of Iowa with a Master's in painting.

Luckily the times they were a changing, but as one of her early influences, feminist Carolee Schneeman, reported, "You know what my professor told me in 1958 when I was at school on scholarship? "OK kid, you are really gifted, but don't set your heart on Art, you are a girl."

Her Professor's point being not necessarily that women have no place in the visual arts (though it might well have been), but that traditionally they haven't had, as evidenced by the textbooks Schneeman and her peers studied which were bereft of a single female creator - not even Camille Claudel.

This is exactly the point which lies at the heart of Marian Churchland's excellent and ethereal BEAST: the exclusion of women from the stiflingly patriarchal world of painting and sculpture both historically - women could acquire neither tuition, raw materials nor patronage - then in its documentation from which, having succeeded against the odds, they were excised.

Think about how many female writers have been lauded over the centuries: publication may have proved problematic (upon being sent a complimentary copy Dickens guessed immediately that George Elliot's Amos Barton was written by a woman - but he did have to guess) but it was a relatively easier arena to compete in than one which for centuries was so cosily in bed with religion then royalty, which was basically a succession of kings.

Anyway, Ana started using her naked body in a series of "illicit art interventions" - which is a great term - to bring attention to sexual violence against women thereby making the personal political indeed. She then began using both film and photography to record sculptural work you could consider both naturalist and naturist before going both back to her roots and pan-cultural in her eclectic embrace of the Cuban and Caribbean. Unfortunately Mendieta ended up the victim of everything she railed against: the violence of men and yet another male-dominated establishment all too happy to gloss over it.

I'll let you read the rest for yourself: I'm too angry to type any more. It's a deeply affecting book illustrated in pen and pencil by Caro Caron in a magical style exactly like that on the cover. Unfortunately it is way too short: a mere twenty pages of sequential art bolstered to forty-seven of actual content by prose and source material reconstructed as newspaper articles... unless you include the Acknowledgements, endpapers and legal stuff.