Ana Mendieta & Andy Warhol

Although, both Ana Mendieta and Andy Warhol had a difficult childhood and similar experiences in life which was the inspiration of their art, their art is very different and even opposite.

           

During 1961, the catholic church in the United States started a program called Peter Pan to bring children from Cuba in order to “save” them from Castro’s regime. For this reason, Ana Mendieta and her sister were brought to this country at the age of 12 and 15, respectively. She and her sister were obligated to leave their family to live with an adoptive family in Iowa. This was a painful event due to the lack of English, the differences in culture, the absence of their parents, and the discrimination for not being white. This event is considered the inspiration of her art. Ana’s art consisted in photography, performances, paints, body art, and sculpture. In her art, she uses nature as her base of art, as she said “I decided that for the images to have magic qualities, I had to work directly with nature. I had to go to the source of life, to mother earth”. Once, she also wrote “The turning point in art was in 1972, when I realized that my paintings were not real enough for what I want the image to convey and by real I mean I wanted my images to have power, to be magic.” Her art was very realistic. She tried to represents topics such as gender, domestic violence, and cultural marginalization.  She did a series of works that represented events where women were raped in the campus of her university. With it, she wanted to represents the crimes and the sexual violence that women are victims of. She used to use her body to represents the subject and the objects on her work (Cabañas, K.). We can relate Ana’s work with the quote “To be naked is to be one self. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for one self. A naked body has to be seen as an object to become nude” (Berger 1972)

            In the case of Andy Warhol, the son of Slovakian immigrants, was born in Pennsylvania, United States. When he was 8, he contracted a nervous system disease that let him on bed for months. During this period, her mom gave him the first art lessons. Also, when he was 9, his mom bought him a camera which he found in it a passion. Another important event in Warhol’s life is the dead of his dad whom had accepted Andy’s artistic talent. One of his dad’s  wills before dying was that his savings were for Andy to go to school to study art. These events were what inspired Andy to do his career in art.  However,opposite to Ana Mendieta, his art was more superficial than realistic and it is represented on his famous quotes “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, there I am. There’s nothing behind it”, “I am a deeply superficial person”, and “I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They are beautiful. Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.” He was one of the founder of Pop Art with pieces like the image of Marilyn Monroe and the Campbell’s soup can. 

            Ana’s and Andy’s work was extremely influenced of the events that occurred throughout their lives. However, their art is very different. While Ana’s art was deeper and realistic, Andy’s art was based on more superficial things.

Work cited: 

1. Berger, J. 1972. Ways of seeing: A book made by John Berger. British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books.

2. Biography, 2018. Andy Warhol Biography. https://www.biography.com/people/andy-warhol-9523875  

3. Cabañas K. 1999. Ana Mendieta. “Pain of Cuba, body I am.” Woman’s Art Journal, Vol. 20, No. 1. Pp. 12-17.

4. Leung, S. 2003. And There I Am: Andy Warhol and the Ethics of identification. Art Journal, Vol 62, No 1. http://draweb.njcu.edu:2134/stable/pdf/3558464.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A9879ed09f3be1db93bfa7e36a5155142

5. The Art Story. Modern Art Insight. Ana Mendieta. http://www.theartstory.org/artist-mendieta-ana.htm