Mythologies of Return: Revisiting Ana Mendieta’s Rupestrian Sculptures

In the summer of 1981, Ana Mendieta returned to Cuba for the first time after a long period of exile to reconnect with her ancestry and identity, working at las Escaleras de Jaruco, a national park outside Havana. Inside the limestone walls of the caves, she carved low-relief sculptures, naming her pieces Iyaré (Mother), Maroya (Moon), Guanaroca (The First Woman), Bacayú (Light of the Day), among others, and gathering them under the title, Rupestrian Sculptures Series. In 2012, I traveled twice to Cuba, in January and in June to document and study the carvings Mendieta had made in 1981. Mendieta photographed these works intending to publish a book of etchings titled Rupestrian Sculptures Series (transcription of artist’s notes, Clearwater 39 – 41); José Juan Arrom, then professor of anthropology at Yale and author of Mythology and Arts of the Prehispanic Antilles (1975), a work which deeply influenced Mendieta, was to write the preface for the book (Clearwater, artist’s notes, 40).

Due to her untimely death in 1985, Mendieta did not finish the project. She completed only five of the twelve sets of photo etchings she had originally conceived, and signed only one of the completed portfolios, now held at the Art Institute of Chicago. Galerie Lelong then hired Liliana Porter to print the rest in 1993, which was followed by Clearwater’s facsimile edition, Ana Mendieta–A Book of Works (1993).

Mythologies of Return: Revisiting Ana Mendieta’s Rupestrian Sculptures is a limited edition artist’s book honoring Ana Mendieta’s Rupestrian Sculptures and her original proposal of making an artist’s book of this series. With the project concept, copperplate photogravure images, printing and binding by Aurora de Armendi Sobrino and an interdisciplinary scholarly essay entitled “Mythologies of Return: The Taíno Route in Ana Mendieta’s Rupestrian Sculptures” by Adriana Méndez Rodenas.