Ana mendieta: Art, artist and literary afterlives

Abstract

Ana Mendieta was one of the most prolific and certainly the most prominent Cuban-American woman artist of the twentieth century. Mendieta's influence on successive generations of artists is undeniable and a growing bibliography on her recognises both her relevance in Cuban and North American feminist art history. However, there is almost nothing written about how she has been represented in literature and how these literary reconstructions address some of the many unanswered questions which remain concerning the artist, her art, her relationship with Cuba, her personal life and her tragic death. This essay begins to address this gap through its discussion of texts by Cuban, Cuban-American and Canadian women writers.