In Conversation

The Tragic Story of Ana Mendieta Is Uncovered in Death of an Artist

Art historian Helen Molesworth, the host of a new Pushkin and Somethin’ Else podcast, on the lessons we can learn from the life of the feminist artist and her relationship with her husband, Carl Andre, who was acquitted of her murder.
Photographs by Ana Mendieta are shown at the Galleria Nazionale D'Arte Moderna during the opening 'Donna on February 18...
Photographs by Ana Mendieta are shown at the Galleria Nazionale D'Arte Moderna during the opening 'Donna, on February 18, 2010 in Rome, Italy. By Franco Origlia/Getty Images.

When Ana Mendieta died after a fall from a 34th-floor window in September 1985, she was a rising star in the art world whose promise was tragically cut short. When her husband, high-profile minimalist artist Carl Andre was acquitted of second degree murder three years later, a sort of détente emerged in the art world. His art was still displayed in museums and galleries across the world, but occasionally protests erupted to raise the issue of the artist’s late third wife. It was an uneasy equilibrium that has become increasingly familiar in the post–#MeToo era.

In a new Pushkin and Somethin’ Else podcast called Death of an Artist, which premieres on September 23, curator and art historian Helen Molesworth revisits that standoff with a focus on illuminating Mendieta’s life and work and documenting the complex reactions to her death among her social set. In new interviews with major art-world figures, like New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl and the anonymous feminist collective Guerrilla Girls, contributions from scholars, and archival audio from Robert Katz, a journalist who conducted roughly 200 interviews connected to the couple’s case in the 1980s, it vividly presents the story anew.

In a video interview, Molesworth told Vanity Fair why she was interested in trying out a new format. “In my museum career, one of the things I really loved to do was give public tours and I think I really honed my ability to talk about works of art in an open language,” she said. “I was interested in seeing if I could migrate to become more of a storyteller, and to see if it was possible to do the visual in the podcast form, something I was interested in experimenting with.”

Molesworth was first approached to work on the podcast with Pushkin back in early 2020, and what followed was a personal journey. She remembers her first introduction to Andre’s work in the 1980s, and describes him as an early artistic “hero” in the first episode for his radical politics and heady approach to art. A few decades later, she was working as a curator at a museum that was considering bringing his retrospective to their galleries, when she started thinking more and more about what her moral responsibility might be when presenting Andre’s work.

So, signing onto work on Death of an Artist was a natural fit. “Selfishly, I knew if I took it on, I’d really have to deal with it,” she said. “If I didn’t take it on, I could continue to just pass it off, but dealing with it was something I was interested in doing.” By the time she finished, she had really confronted “the stark reality” of what happened to Mendieta, and it was “overwhelming.”

Helen Molesworth

By Brigitte Lacombe.

The show also weaves in a third strand, the growth of Mendieta’s legacy after her death. There was one thing that few anticipated back when Andre was acquitted and the community around him closed ranks: Over the next few decades, Cuban-born Mendieta’s work reached a new generation of artists and art historians, who saw its relevance and prescience to the preoccupations of the modern world, like the environment, migration, impermanence, and the body.

Studying the work closely helped Molesworth understand its thematic relevance in ways she hadn’t when she was first introduced to it in the context of second-wave feminism. “I don’t think I saw how important she is when it comes to things like migration, diaspora, the ridiculous fallacy of geography,” she said. “I didn’t understand her as in really thinking about the land, the earth, and environmental issues.”

On the podcast, Molesworth tells the story of how Mendieta’s reputation grew in the wake of her death, how it inspired a wave of activism among younger people, and what that meant for art-world gatekeepers who were continuing to exhibit Andre’s work. “Could the art world’s unofficial rule that we separate the art from the artist still hold? Could I continue to love both Ana Mendieta’s and Carl Andre’s work?” she says in the trailer. “It felt like the only way to answer that question was to ask another: What really happened to Ana Mendieta?” So over the course of six episodes, she unpacks the story of Mendieta’s turbulent life, her initial meetings with Andre, and the devolution of their relationship over the course of a few years. She lingers on that last night and the legal questions that emerge afterward, when Andre is charged and eventually goes on trial. One refrain throughout the trial is the legal uncertainty that arises in any death when there are no eyewitnesses, because it’s difficult to prove some claims beyond a reasonable doubt.

In revisiting the incident, she was surprised by how much our conversations about intimate-partner violence have changed since Mendieta’s death. “There was not a pervasive understanding of domestic violence, that 90% of women who are killed in this country are killed by an intimate, and that of that 90% who are killed by an intimate, the percentage of those folks who are murdered without a witness is extremely high,” she said. “What’s devastating about the story at its largest level is that our justice system doesn’t protect people without power.” (According to The New York Times, evidence at the trial showed that Mendieta had “consumed a considerable amount of alcohol” prior to her death. Andre had said that they had a “quarrel,” but that he was not in the room when she fell from the window.)

The podcast also examines the moral attitudes of the art world and its emphasis on mid-century fixation on the so-called genius. “Part of the thrill and the attraction in the philosophical and emotional pull of art is that it transcends time every once in a while. What do you do when this thing that transcends time is made by someone who is a mere mortal?” Molesworth said. “The art and the people are different, and I think that in the West, we do not yet understand how to have those conversations or [make them] more ethically productive.”

Molesworth said the podcast was also a valuable exercise in learning how to listen to the concerns of younger generations. “I’m Gen X, and we’re this weird generation in between baby boomers and millennials. So we’ve had to reject baby boomer stuff, but now we’re being asked to learn from those who are younger than us, right? That’s harder to do than I thought it was going to be, but I also think it’s really healthy. We have to learn and teach and listen to across generational lines,” she said. “I feel very open to trying to learn what I can and to offer what I can about what was working from the old ways, and to adopt the new ways.”