Upon entering the exhibition, visitors encountered Exprimidos (2019), an installation arrayed at ground level. Exprimidos, which translates to “pressed” or “pressed out,” was also created while Argote was in residence in East Harlem and, similar to As Above, So Below, draws on spatial and material elements of El Barrio, as the area is colloquially known. Arranged in rows reminiscent of New York’s street grid, each unit combines a wooden tortilla press with a sponge soaked in an avocado and iron dye and draped with a length of raw silk. The title refers to the pressing, absorption, and release of the dye, and its consequent staining of the silk, evinced in a concatenation of discrete parallel units splayed open for the viewer. By laying bare her own process and its incorporation of local materials, Argote alludes to localized forms of production and labor, and the ways in which that labor is extracted from local residents.

Argote’s appropriation of urban vernacular forms is in keeping with her interest in the spatial contours, visual elements, activities, and inhabitants of the surroundings in which she works. Many of the works on view utilized materials native to the environments in which they were created, making reference to discrete ecosystems that nonetheless contain echoes of globalized processes.

The surfaces of these works provide tactile evidence of Argote’s investigations. At the top of each work is a square on which the artist would position herself while she painted on the floor, allowing the composition to extend from her body outward in a series of circular, searching motions. For Argote, this process is inspired by street vendors displaying their wares to the public, a gesture which the artist perceives as both generous and practical. With her fingers, she explores and composes the surface of the painting, in a form of somatic learning and transmission.

The painting’s warm hues and matte finish are the results of natural dyes and pigments, including avocado, iron, and cochineal. The reaction of the acidic avocado pit with iron creates a warm black, whereas the cochineal’s reaction produces purple-red hues. These materials resonate with colonial and contemporary histories. Cochineal, considered precious by Pre-Columbian peoples and named for the Mesoamerican insect from which it is derived, was famously sought after by Spanish colonizers and subsequently adopted by painters across Europe.⁵ The recent resurgence of demand for cochineal as a natural dye to replace artificial food coloring has coincided with the popularity of contemporary “wellness culture,” which has also given rise to a global appetite for avocados, resulting in the destruction of protected woodlands and cartel violence in the Mexican state of Michoacán.⁶

The final pieces in the exhibition retranslated this alchemy of natural elements and bodily mark making in two works on paper, which were produced while Argote was in residence in Guadalajara at Taller Los Guayabos. Departing from the more gestural paintings, Argote wet the paper and used her feet to work its fibers into the tiles of the Taller’s floor, creating an impression of the grid. Argote prepared the paper with a layer of iron and tannic acid from guava leaves, then soaked herself in lemon juice to create a series of bleachlike marks where the juice reacted with the dyes; a kind of negative image generated through contact with the body.

Like Argote, Mendieta’s multidisciplinary practice was informed by her immigrant experience. In September of 1961, at the age of twelve, Mendieta was sent from Havana to live in Iowa with her sister after her father joined anti-Castro counterrevolutionary forces, an action for which he was subsequently imprisoned that same year. The sisters spent this period moving between orphanages and foster homes. Though she was later reunited with her mother and father in Iowa, in 1966 and 1979, respectively, Mendieta’s experiences of exile and societal marginalization left a deep impression that would continue to inform her work throughout her career, finding particular expression in her ephemeral earth/body sculptures.^{8 9}

As her body-centered practice developed, Mendieta began what would prove to be a crucial shift in her practice: moving her work to the outdoors, in direct contact with nature. In these pieces, the outline of Mendieta’s body appears on a variety of natural surfaces through carvings and ephemeral actions, first outside Iowa City and Oaxaca, Mexico, and later in Cuba. Employing whatever natural materials were on hand, and occasionally gunpowder or fire, these earth/body sculptures bore evidence of the female body and of the labor from which they were produced, but Mendieta is largely absent, leaving an archetypal female form imprinted on the landscape in her stead. Documentation in photography and film became stand-ins for ephemeral pieces from her Silueta series (1973–80), which grew to number in the hundreds and were all left exposed to the elements and time. Mendieta would later move toward more object-based practices of carving, scorching, and drawing this iconography on tree trunks and leaves, imbuing organic materials with a psychic charge and spiritual content that exceeded the simplicity of their material supports.

While passionately connecting the earth/body works to her own longing for her homeland, the statement also aligns Mendieta’s practices with a primordial past, situating them outside of the cultural, historical, and sociopolitical structures that had forced her into exile. Her use of contemporary media and feminist strategies emphasizing the body served to reify symbols and spiritual practices that circumvented and predated colonialism, forging alternative systems of meaning outside those dominant structures.

For Mendieta, the condition of alterity was an existential one. In the introductory catalogue essay for Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States (1980), Mendieta took ownership of “Third World,” a term often applied disparagingly to women artists from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, preferring the exclusion of white patriarchal society, and its foil in the American feminist movement of the 1960’s and ’70s, to complicity in colonialism, racism and exploitation. “Do we exist?,” asks Mendieta. “To question our cultures is to question our own existence, our human reality. To confront this fact means to acquire an awareness of ourselves. This in turn becomes a search, a questioning of who we are and how we will realize ourselves.”¹⁴

Though distinct in their approaches, both Mendieta and Agote’s use of natural materials and the body provide a means of searching through spaces within and beyond the dominant systems structuring existence, conjuring dimensions of identity and lived experience that might otherwise remain invisible. Informed by their respective dual nationalities, each artist’s practice explores notions of self, belonging, and home by employing improvised and embodied strategies to wield critical observations of their surroundings, while invoking an intimate emotional core. Guided by curious intellect and an attraction to mystical cosmologies, both Mendieta and Argote produced works that draw on specificities of place yet, nonetheless, hint at the universal or divine. In tracing their singular traversals of intersecting worlds and temporalities, and navigations within physical environments and social structures, these women forged powerful connections through site, material, and presence.

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Amye McCarther
Archivist, New Museum of Contemporary Art
Published February 19, 2020