Mendieta was born in 1948 in Havana, Cuba, she lived there till 1961. Little after Mendieta came to the United States by way of the famous “Operation Peter Pan”. She later attended the university of Iowa, where she graduated with a master in Arts. Mendieta dedicated her productions to looking critically at the society around her, to later in her art work. She used her body as a voice to show the worlds suffering and to shed light on our society’s problems. She would use racism, politics, violence and exile in her art work. In many of her art work she used nature as her inspiration, to show the connection between humans and nature. This type of inspiration is where Land art come to arise. All her art work has one common denominator and that…show more content… Mendieta registered step by step the process of cutting the mustache and beard of a friend and later collecting all the hairs and gluing them to her face. Mendieta describes this piece as a continuance of the art piece of Marcel Duchamp L.H.O.O.Q (1919). A piece where he reproduced the Mona Lisa of Leonardo by adding a beard and mustache.
Another important mark in her art work was the Rape Scene (1973). She reacted to the violence of a young girl that went to school with her that was raped and killed at the university. Mendieta exposed herself bare and covered in blood, as if they were signs of violence against her in her dorm room. She recreated the scene in her room showing the atrocity done to women and insight showing how women are used as sexual object. The piece is graphic and very detailed, its shows her bent over a table and blood running down her legs, and signs of the room being trashed.
Mendieta worked with blood in many of her art pieces, her dark past and ideas of liberalism took her to portray her body in many ways of pain. She is a feminist and most of her most famous visual famous pieces were of her body. In the same year, she did another art work called “People Looking at Blood”. Where she made it seem as if blood was coming out from under her front door and blood all over the side walk. This art work was also a cry out against violence against
