Culture December 2, 2019

In April 1973, the twenty-four-year-old Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta invited her fellow University of Iowa MFA students to her apartment. They arrived to find the door ajar. Stepping inside, they encountered a grisly tableau, a performance later known as Untitled (Rape Scene). Tied to a table and bent at the waist, Mendieta wore a plaid shirt loosely over her torso while her lower half remained exposed: underwear around her ankles, backside and legs smeared with blood, all harshly spot-lit. The artist later recalled that her classmates immediately “all sat down, and started talking about it. I didn’t move. I