Artist Ana Mendieta’s Killer has Died at the Too Old Age of 88

**TRIGGER WARNING**   

Cuban artist Ana Mendieta died on September 8, 1985, in New York City, after falling from her 34th-floor apartment in Greenwich Village at 300 Mercer Street. She lived there with her husband of eight months, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. She fell 33 stories onto the roof of a deli.

Just prior to her death, neighbors heard the couple arguing violently. The neighbors heard Mendieta scream out “no” right before her death, and Andre had scratches all over his face. There were no eyewitnesses to the events that led up to Mendieta’s death.

A recording of Andre’s 911 call showed him saying: “My wife is an artist, and I’m an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, eh, exposed to the public than she was. And she went to the bedroom, and I went after her, and she went out the window.”

During three years of legal proceedings, Andre’s lawyer described Mendieta’s death as a possible accident or a suicide. After a nonjury trial, Andre was acquitted of second-degree murder in February 1988 and led to outrage in the art world. Her killer as of 2022 continued to live in the apartment where he killed her.

Since Ana’s killer’s acquittal, protests had been staged over the years at various exhibitions and retrospectives of his career. “Where Is Ana Mendieta?” signs are often held.

Ana would have been 75 years old today had she lived. Her artwork has remained influential and an homage to her work was recently seen in Ari Aster’s Midsommar (https://www.tumblr.com/12h51mn/188192938743/ana-mendieta-1948-1985-midsommar-2019).   

Ana’s site, run by her estate: https://www.anamendietaartist.com/   

Death of an Artist, a podcast about Ana’s life and death: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/death-of-an-artist 

MoMA profile: https://www.moma.org/artists/3924

Remembering Ana Mendieta: https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/articles/2021/10/from-the-vaults-remembering-ana-mendieta

Oh my goodness, I just read a remembrance post about this artist as the inventor of minimalism without a mention of Ana Mendieta. RIP to her.