I believe Ana Mendieta had a lot to say and a lot to give to people. Looking at her work, it looked like she was saying everything she could in her art, but that she didn't get it all out or that people didn't understand fully what she was trying to say.

 

This is her Blood Sign #2 that we saw in class and learned that when she did these, she would cut herself and slap her hands on the wall. Then she would slowly drop to the floor like someone would if they had been injured and were trying to support yourself against the wall and were slowly getting more weak and falling to the ground.

This is Mendieta's Blood Sign #1 that she made around 1974. The last picture in this sequence looks to read, "There is a devil inside me." Mendieta's works often carry with them lots of feelings of violence and hatred either for herself or for someone else that she's met or maybe not. Her works also bring attention to the violence that women often face in society that they are subjected to either by the man in their lives or by society as a whole, and Mandieta, being a female who was attmepting to make it in the world of art, I'm sure, had an extraordinarily hard time being subjected to violence before she was finally shoved out of her 34th floor apartment window and died at the hands of her husband.

 

 

These are some of her untitled self-portraits with her face covered in blood. This one she made in 1973 and it appears that she has her own blood flowing down her face and staining her white shirt as she looks to weak from enduring the violence that she can't even hold her head up for this picture.

 

 

This is Facial Hair Transplant made in 1972. She took facial hair from one of her fellow male artists and attached it to her own face. I think this is commenting on the power that males had in society and continue to hold today in society and how much they are looked up to and held as the standard for everybody, even women. Women will never be as strong as men. Is this Mandieta showing that she desires not to be a man per se, but to have the power and the rights and not to be discriminated against as a woman, especially in the arts.

 

 

This is her Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints-Face). To me, this is speaking of the way women's faces and bodies are picked apart and distorted by society and how they are looked at under a microscope and picked apart with a fine-toothed comb. To me, she is bringing the focus on the ridiculous ways that women are seen in society and were seen in society and how much attention is put on the beauty and good looks of women and how their value is found only in that and in the man she is with.