ABSTRACT
Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta has been positioned within many different interpretive frames, including feminist art, earth art, and performance. This essay undertakes a historiography of the reception of Mendieta, starting with her earliest exhibitions and writings about her, to argue that such frames have never been discrete and in fact are productively overlapping. It also seeks to understand her relationship to Third World feminisms during her lifetime, as well as her influence for conversations around intersectionality in the decades since. To do so, this essay examines how Mendieta worked not only with but against a monolithic idea of “the body” to propose multiple bodies and multiple selves.
