Andy Warhol & Ana Mendieta

"The painting maintains its own authority" (Berger 26).

Andy Warhol was a leading figure during the pop art movement. He was not only an artist, but also was a director and a producer. He started out as a low profile artist, creating advertisement for magazines like "Glamour". He wanted his name to be known, and he started creating works of art to become famous. During the 1960s he became more interested in creating paintings of things like Coca-Cola, Campbell's Soup, a dollar bills. His life and the events that occurred in it  One of his more well-known paintings, the painting of Marylin Monroe, was created during this time period. What was unique about Warhol was his way of taking something simple, like a company brand, and making it into something of his own. Just by using simple colors and mixes, he was able to make something in everyday life a masterpiece. Often in his works he used bright colors, in both happy and depressing paintings. The use of his coloring made the paintings come alive.

Ana Mendieta is an artist to whom I feel I connect with. Her works express much of how I feel towards life and how I want to use my art to express a form of activism. Through her work, she used elements of nature to express her arts theme (life, death, feminism, etc). She felt that, because we are one with the earth, when she would create her sculptures or paintings she felt whole again. By creating herself as an element of nature, it was like she was depicting herself completely through each theme she created. She used her body, fully exposed, to at times create her works. "The body is the first visible sign we use to make judgements of one another" (Finkelstein 96). Like Mendieta, I create art surrounding feminism and life. Both of us have a strong view on women empowerment, but what I found to be interesting was how she depicted women empowerment with nature and how it became her whole self. The concept of her using nature to describe herself is like how I use musical notes or biblical texts to describe myself. It is an indirect self portrait. Her life events definitely played a part in her art work. Between coming here in her early teen years and moving around a lot in her first few years in America, her work depicts her life is beautiful but temporary.

Warhol and Mendieta both created breath-taking pieces of art work. "Thus, Castiglione's work was more than a compendium of social manners as it addressed concerns about the effect of political power and authority, social mobility, gender, ethics and the dispositions of the natural body" (Finkelstein 87). Mendieta was more realistic and meaningful, while Warhol was more superficial and self-serving. One of Mendieta's most controversial and known pieces was when she recreated a rape scene that happened on her college campus as a form of protest. Many of times we hear people victim shaming and asking questions about the victim and what they were doing that may have provoked the assault to happen, but never really focus on the brutal attack that took place. In this Untitled recreation Mendieta created, it shows the brutality of rape and that no matter what the victim was wearing/doing would provoke such violence. She shed a light on something that many do not dare to discuss. Warhol's works were more of a sense of immortalizing the person or symbolism he painted. It is more of a feel-good and lively work than Mendieta's, which got to the nitty-gritty of the issues she was passionate about using her body and elements of nature. "To be naked is to be without disguise" (Berger 54). She completely exposed herself through her art.


Works Cited:

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series with John Berger. British Broadcasting Corp., 2012.

Finkelstein, Joanne, et al. “The Art of Self Invention.” By Joanne Finkelstein,