Tate Modern Spotlights Influential Iowa Artist Ana Mendieta

Ana Mendieta, La Jungla (Totem Grove) 1985, installation view at Tate Modern 2026. Artworks © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Licensed by Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. DACS 2026. Photo © Tate (Yili Liu).

Before the Tate Modern opened its major exhibition earlier this year celebrating the work of artist Ana Mendieta (69BA, 72MA, 77MFA), representatives from the prestigious London museum traveled to the University of Iowa.

Guided by UI art professor Isabel Barbuzza, Tate curators visited sites central to Mendieta’s development as an artist in the 1970s. Joining them on the trip—which included a stop at the Black Angel, the Iowa City landmark in Oakland Cemetery where Mendieta once filmed a performance piece—were Mendieta’s niece and estate administrator, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, and representatives from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“They wanted to absorb what is here in Iowa and where she went at the art school,” says Barbuzza. “Her work was very radical, and she did a lot of that work here in Iowa.”

Ana Mendieta, Untitled 1972, installation view at Tate Modern 2026. Artworks © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Licensed by Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. DACS 2026. Photo © Tate (Yili Liu).

The Tate retrospective traces Mendieta’s evolution from a UI painting student to a groundbreaking multidisciplinary artist. The exhibit, which runs through Jan. 17 and features more than 120 pieces, brings together some of Mendieta’s most iconic works alongside remastered films, early paintings, sculptural pieces, and restaged installations.

Mendieta was born in 1948 in Havana, Cuba. She was sent to the U.S. with her sister at age 12 as part of Operation Peter Pan, which resettled children during the Cuban Revolution, and spent her teenage years in an orphanage in Dubuque, Iowa, and several foster homes.

Mendieta earned a bachelor’s degree in art education and a master’s degree in painting at the UI before joining its innovative intermedia program. Pursuing an MFA, Mendieta began exploring the relationship between humans and the natural world through photography, film, performance, and printmaking. Often described by scholars as an early ecofeminist, Mendieta used organic subjects such as blood, feathers, and her own body interacting with the earth to explore themes of identity and displacement.

“One of the reasons that her work was so ahead of its time and so relevant to people right now is that she refused to accept these boundaries between media,” says Lauren Lessing, director of the UI Stanley Museum of Art. “She was too big for them and ranged freely across them and took from all of them. That’s relevant to the way a lot of contemporary artists are working now, but she was doing it in the early 1970s. And the intermedia program here was a key to unlocking that in her.”

After leaving Iowa, Mendieta eventually moved to New York and exhibited her work internationally in the 1970s and ’80s. Her life was cut tragically short at age 36 when she fell to her death from her Greenwich Village apartment window.

Today, Mendieta’s art continues to enthrall museumgoers. At the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, the exhibit Ana Mendieta: Traces runs through Feb. 28.

Ana Mendieta, Bird Run 1974, installation view at Tate Modern 2026. Artwork © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Licensed by Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. DACS 2026. Photo © Tate (Yili Liu).

Meanwhile, at her alma mater, the Stanley is home to two photographs and three video pieces that are periodically rotated into exhibits. And in 2022, the UI School of Art, Art History, and Design dedicated a gallery in the Visual Arts Building to Mendieta in conjunction with a student-led exhibition of her work.

Barbuzza, who teaches sculpture and intermedia, says that Mendieta remains an inspiring figure for students. “We talk about Ana Mendieta’s work; we talk about her importance,” she says. “There are students who do performance, and there are students who are very interested in the landscape and ecology. She has an incredible connection here.”