The story of the late artist Ana Mendieta has made headlines, with a novel recently published and a documentary in the works based on her tragic life and death. Mendieta's granddaughter, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, has been made the administrator of her estate increasingly restless about the legacy of Mendieta and how these media projects describe its history.
Born in Cuba to an upper-class family, in 1961, 12-year-old Mendieta and her older sister were sent to the United States to live in Dubuque, Iowa, as part of Operation Peter Pan, a program for the Cuban children to escape. Fidel Castro's regime. Mendieta became a successful performance artist, sculptor and painter.
Facing a great deal of discrimination in art school, her work focused primarily on violence against women. After completing her studies, Mendieta moved to New York City, where she met her husband, the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. Her life was tragically cut short when she fell from her 34th floor apartment in New York City's Greenwich Village, where she had been living with Andre for eight months.
Controversial death
Her death has been the subject of controversy, with Andre charged and later acquitted of her murder. Although fellow artists came to Andre's defense, Mendieta's family and supporters continued to believe that he was responsible for her death. According to one New York Times ITEM from 1988, a recording of Andrei's 911 call revealed him saying, “My wife is an artist, and I'm an artist, and we had an argument about the fact that I was more, uh, exposed to the public than she was. And she went into the bedroom, and I followed her, and she went out the window.” Make what you will of this statement, but there certainly seems to be grounds for believing that her death was not a suicide or an accident.
Portrait of the beggar
A 2022 true crime podcast about history was severely criticized as the marginalization of Mendieta's life and legacy, as it focused mainly on Andre's life and career. Now, two recent works in particular, a novel by Xochitl Gonzalez and an upcoming documentary starring America Ferrera, have renewed concerns from Mendieta's estate about how her life and death are portrayed. While wealth has control over its physical art and how it is used (in 2018, wealth sued Amazon Studios for a film that was heavily based on Mendieta's works), her biographical rights are another story.
Property rights
“Generally, if you want to tell a story about a deceased public figure, you don't need to get permission from their estate,” explains Nicole Page, a partner at Reavis Page Jump LLP in New York City. “However, if you want to use that individual's music, artwork, or other intellectual property in your production or book, or if you want to include archival material, and their estate owns and controls the copyright or access to those works, you will have to get permission from the estate. In that case, it's typical for an estate to request certain consultation (or even approval) rights over the content, allowing the estate to have input into how the story is told.”
Unfortunately for Mendieta's estate, American courts have supported this legal notion, such as Seale v. Gramercy Pictures, who stated that as long as the purpose of the works is to “capture the 'essence' of a historical event and not necessarily to recreate for the audience every historical detail of that event”, permission from the personality being portrayed in a dramatization is not necessary. Additionally, an estate cannot sue for damages such as defamation or defamation on behalf of a deceased person unless the wrongdoing occurred before the individual's death (but again, even in such cases, courts have been lenient allowing creators to have “artistic license” and creative freedom as long as the facts of the individual's life basically correct). Therefore, Mendieta's wealth seems unlucky to have a say in her portrayal.