Virtual Author Talk: Mendieta’s Mythological Landscape

When

Wednesday, July 21, 2021

7pm Where

Zoom

Who

Adults, Teens

Admission Registration required

Adriana Méndez Rodenas, Professor of Caribbean and Latin American Literatures at the University of Missouri, will discuss Ana Mendieta’s 1981 video, Esculturas Rupestres, currently on view in Landscape Art & Virtual Travel.

Méndez Rodenas will talk about the way that artists imaginatively recreate and reshape various landscapes, a topic she explores in her book, co-authored with Aurora de Armendi, Mythologies of Return: Revisiting Ana Mendieta’s Rupestrian Sculptures. The book describes the way Mendieta returned to a real landscape—the limestone caves of eastern Cuba—while refashioning and mythologizing it to depict the female deities of the Taíno indigenous pantheon. As seen in the work on view at the Museum, Mendieta identified with the Taínos as a way to grapple with her own exiled condition.

 

Image: Cynthia Daignault (American, b. 1978). Light Atlas (detail), 2016. Oil on linen, 360 canvases. On loan from Art Bridges, AB.2019.2.

 

Support provided by Art Bridges.