Hayley Lonergan ’26
Resignifying the Subaltern Subject: Absence as an Aesthetic Intervention in Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series
Hayley Lonergan ’26, History and Art History major
Faculty mentor: Dr. Ellen Feiss, Art and Art History
This paper identifies the late artist Ana Mendieta’s utilization of absence in her Silueta Series as an aesthetic strategy which undermines colonial and patriarchal scripts that cast women into the sphere of nature in an essentialist manner, while also serving as an intervention into the male-dominated Minimalist art scene of the time. Whereas extant scholarship on the series has failed to compare her employment of absence against its common usage in canonical Minimalism and earthworks, I argue that Mendieta generates her own relationship with the earth outside of dominant social scripts by defining her subjectivity as one which is indistinguishable from the earth itself. In so doing, she denies the separation of her body and the earth mandated in Western patriarchy, showing the profound influence of postcolonial feminist interference in the canonical art of the 1970s.
Oral Presentation: Wednesday, April 23, 4:12 p.m.
