BERKELEY, CA.- The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive presents Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta, on view November 9, 2016 through January 15, 2017. During her brief career—just fourteen years, between 1971 and 1985—the Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) produced a stunning body of work that included performances, drawings, sculptures, installations, and photographs. This exhibition, organized by the Katherine E. Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota, brings together twenty-one of Mendieta’s recently preserved filmworks—many of which have had little previous exposure—in addition to a selection of related photographs; to date it is the largest grouping of the artist’s filmworks to be presented in an exhibition in the United States. With her unique synthesis of sculpture, earth art, and performance, Mendieta unflinchingly investigated what it means to be human, and her artwork continues to speak powerfully to diverse audiences across generations.

Ana Mendieta was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1948 and was sent to the United States (without her parents) in 1961 at the age of twelve. After receiving undergraduate and graduate degrees in studio and intermedia art from the University of Iowa, Mendieta moved to New York in 1978. She received multiple grants, including the Rome Prize from the American Academy, and she produced important artworks in Cuba, Italy, Mexico, and the United States. She died in 1985 at the age of thirty-six in a fall from the thirty-fourth-floor apartment she shared in New York with her husband, the artist Carl Andre.

The exhibition comprises twenty-one filmworks projected in the galleries. Mendieta made many of these in Mexico, where she traveled and worked nearly every summer during the 1970s. It is in these filmworks that Mendieta established her unique earth-body aesthetic, merging her figure with the natural landscape through an exploration of history and memory. The artist was influenced by and interested in many of the artistic movements of her time, including Minimalism, Conceptualism, earth art, performance art, and feminism, as well as the historical and spiritual legacies, both ancient and modern, of many indigenous cultures from Africa, Europe, and the Americas. She drew from each of these influences but ultimately it is the originality and surprising inventiveness of her work that sets it apart.

Also on view are three series of photographs related to the filmworks, and a short 2015 documentary, Ana Mendieta: Nature Inside, produced by Cecilia M. Mendieta, on view in BAMPFA’s lower-level Theater 2.