Resul Maksut
Born in Cuba, Mendieta came to the
United States as a refugee in 1961 at the age of 12. The trauma of separation
from her family, culture, and homeland became the base of her style, which was
stared from physical and spiritual connections between the body and the natural
world. She wrote, “I have thrown myself into the very elements that produced
me. It is through my sculptures that I assert my emotional ties to the earth
and conceptualize culture.” The Silueta series hundreds of earth body works and
related photographs and films creates the base of her life’s project. Based
initially on her own body and silhouette, the Siluetas developed into a collection
of outdoor earthly figures and eventually more human forms and incorporated a some
ritual effects drawn from different religions. A busy time in her life was
traveling to Cuba, where Mendieta felt her practice was reconnected with its origins,
prompted drawings, etchings, and sculptures, in which, for the first time, her
iconic figures became beautiful individual objects. 
Andy
grew up during the Great Depression in the urban surroundings of an industrial
city. At an early age he showed a great talent for drawing. Due to an illness at
the age of 6 he was stuck in bed and his mother and brothers would entertain
him for hours by showing him how to draw, trace and print images. Andy loved to
draw throughout his childhood. When Andy’s father died in 1942, his main wish
was that Andy continues his education to college. In 1945, Andy was accepted at
Carnegie Institute of Technology. He would be the first of his family to ever
go beyond high school. Upon graduation in 1949, Andy and fellow classmate and
artist Philip Pearlstein boarded an overnight train to New York City to pursue the
art world. In 1960
he purchased a four-story townhouse and experimented with using comic strip
imagery as his Art. The subject matter was untraditional and unique at the
time. These early Pop paintings had a different look then people were used to.
Over the next several months his painting style would evolve into being more
flat and graphic. One consistent aspect, though, was that everyone in everyday
life knew the images.
Andy and Anna both had things in
common from their early childhoods and early years. Anna was separated from her
Cuban family to become an adopted refugee in America throughout her adolescent
years when she felt like an outsider growing up in the Midwest, she felt an
ever-present disconnection from the concepts of mother, place, identity,
belonging, and home. While Andy, emerged from the poverty and obscurity of an
Eastern European immigrant family in Pittsburgh. Both growing up in a lower
class being molded from such a young age, taking on the challenges of the world
and being able to spin them around and create fame and fortune for themselves.
This eventually shows in the styles and themes surrounding their work such as
absence and empty feelings. Anna sustained use of the body's simplified and
often nude form to depict both presence and its opposite, absence is an
essential component to her work whether denoting the human. This is very
similar too how others view some of his first expressions of compassion fatigue
the way the public loses the ability to sympathize with events from which they
feel removed. Another similarity is these two artistes were doing things that
stood out such as they types of art they were making. Anna was recognized as an
important contributor to land art, a movement in which landscape and the work
of art are inextricably linked, taking the possibilities of art outside gallery
confines, not many artistes at the time were really focusing on this at the
time. Which leads to Andy and how he draws on popular culture throughout the
twentieth century, Pop art marked an important new stage in the breakdown
between high and low art forms. His paintings were important in pioneering
these developments, but it is arguable that the diverse activities of his later
years were just as influential in expanding the implications of Pop art into
other spheres, and further eroding the borders between the worlds of high art
and popular culture.
Work cited
“Ana Mendieta Biography, Art, and
Analysis of Works.” The Art Story, www.theartstory.org/artist-mendieta-ana.htm.
“Ana Mendieta.” The Art Institute
of Chicago, www.artic.edu/exhibition/ana-mendieta.
“Andy Warhol Biography.” The Andy
Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts - Andy Warhol Biography,
warholfoundation.org/legacy/biography.html.
“Andy Warhol Biography, Art, and
Analysis of Works.” The Art Story, www.theartstory.org/artist-warhol-andy.htm.
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