Ana Mendieta Estate Heads to Marian Goodman Gallery

Marian Goodman Gallery will now characterize the property of Ana Mendieta, the pioneering Cuban-born multidisciplinary artist. The gallery will mount its first Mendieta exhibition in November in New York, forward of a serious Tate Trendy retrospective subsequent 12 months.

As a part of the settlement, the property will proceed to work with Alison Jacques in London and Prats Nogueras Blanchard in Barcelona and Madrid, however will depart Galerie Lelong, which represented Mendieta’s work for over three many years.

“With thrilling new initiatives forward and growing momentum across the work, we realized that we would have liked a bigger gallery—one that would assist us carry Ana’s legacy into the longer term and meet the calls for of this subsequent chapter,” mentioned Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, the artist’s niece, who has been the property’s administrator since 2013.

“It’s an enormous honor for us to work with the property of Ana Mendieta,” Junette Teng, a associate at Marian Goodman Gallery, informed ARTnews. “Her work is deeply private and universally resonant, whereas additionally conceptually rigorous, which makes her a pure match for our program. She actually expanded the probabilities of what artwork might be.”

Mendieta, who was born in Havana in 1948 and despatched to Iowa through the Cuban Revolution, is finest recognized for her multidisciplinary “earth-body” works exploring themes of migration, spirituality, and humanity’s relationship with the pure world. She used site-specific supplies to insert the human kind into nature, usually incorporating her silhouette or using her physique as a canvas. She then documented these ephemeral interventions with images and Tremendous 8 footage, that are exhibited at this time.

Throughout her lifetime, Mendieta earned a Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two grants from the Nationwide Endowment for the Arts. Her work was commissioned by non-public collectors and bought by establishments together with the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork.

Following Mendieta’s premature dying in September 1985, on the age of 36, her older sister Raquelín labored with a committee of the artist’s associates and friends to arrange a 1987 retrospective on the New Museum in New York. In 1991, Mendieta’s property started its lengthy partnership with Lelong, which had simply opened a New York department, led by Mary Sabbatino, its vice chairman and associate.

“Mary Sabbatino and I developed a relationship that was greater than only a partnership—we grew to become like household,” Raquelín Mendieta informed ARTnews in an electronic mail. “I’m extraordinarily grateful to Mary for recognizing the significance of Ana’s work early on, and for the entire fantastic years of collaboration between the property and the gallery.” Thus far, the artist’s work has appeared in over 600 group exhibits and over 55 solo exhibitions, together with 16 museum retrospectives.

Lately, public consciousness round Mendieta’s life and work has grown, due partly to a wave of media initiatives developed without the estate’s support. Final November, Mendieta’s work set a brand new public sale file at Christie’s, the place an untitled 1985 wooden sculpture bought for $756,000, marking the third file for her artwork set in 12 months.

Raquel Cecilia believes that up to date viewers are responding to the common, well timed questions in her aunt’s work: “‘Who’re we? The place will we come from? The place will we belong?’”

“There’s a seek for some sort of religious and cultural grounding” in at this time’s cultural and political panorama, added Rose Lord, a associate at Marian Goodman.

However all of this consideration means new calls for on each the property and the gallery representing it; licensing and mortgage requests have surged, and, Raquel Cecilia mentioned, “we have now museums who’re focused on putting in a few of Ana’s site-specific works, which we’ve by no means accomplished earlier than.” In July 2026, the Tate Trendy will current a big retrospective of the artist’s work, images, movies, sculptures, and earthworks, bringing a number of items to the UK for the primary time.

“Ana would have been very excited and proud to be in a gallery that represents Robert Smithson and [Giuseppe] Penone, amongst different artists there who’re aligned together with her work,” Raquelín wrote about Marian Goodman’s roster. “She additionally would have felt gratified to know that her work has resonated for thus a few years and continues to succeed in new audiences—that the general public has engaged not solely together with her artwork, however with the concepts behind it.”