Nile Born is a sculpture made of sand, overlaid on a wooden base and shaped to the scale and contour of the artist’s body. While Nile Born is meant to be installed in a gallery, Mendieta is also known for works in which she directly imprinted her body on the natural landscape and documented this action via photography or film.
The form of the female body in this sculpture is both specific and universal, based on the scale of Mendieta’s body but also serving as a symbol of every woman. As a Cuban American exiled from her home country for most of her life, Mendieta considered making art to be “the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source.”
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Ana Mendieta
American, born Cuba. 1948–1985 34 works onlineBorn in Cuba, Mendieta moved to Iowa at age 12 with her sister as part of a US government asylum program for adolescents after the Cuban revolution.
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Earthwork
Art that is made by shaping the land itself or by making forms in the land using natural materials like rocks or tree branches.
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