Calivas Isn’t Updating Ana Mendieta.
She’s Refusing Her.

Every review of Jenny Calivas’s Self-Portraits While Buried reaches for Ana Mendieta in the first paragraph, and every review is half right. The Brooklyn Rail’s review of the show makes the comparison explicitly, then immediately complicates it: Mendieta’s earth-burial performances argued for union with the land, a body returning to nature as a kind of completion. Calivas buries herself too, but she keeps a fist clenched around a cable release that never disappears into the frame. That fist is doing the actual argument. It isn’t continuity with Mendieta’s program. It’s a rejection of its premise.

Ana Mendieta’s Silueta works, made through the 1970s, pressed her own body into earth, sand, and grass to dissolve the self into landscape — sincere, almost devotional images of a body becoming indistinguishable from the ground it lay in. Calivas borrows that exact visual grammar: body, earth, camera, absence. Then she uses it to argue close to the opposite. Where Mendieta wanted to disappear, Calivas wants to be found. The clenched hand on the cable release isn’t a compositional accident or a technical necessity born of working a 4x5 by feel. It’s the one element in the photograph that refuses Mendieta’s whole conclusion, the detail that keeps the body from completing the dissolve Mendieta was after.

Look at where Calivas chooses to stop hiding. In Self-Portrait While Buried #1, the lede image for the show, her dark hair spreads above her head, both arms are revealed, and she’s visibly wearing a t-shirt — dressed, not disappearing, not gestating, not dead. Compare that to Mendieta’s Siluetas, where the body’s outline is often the only thing left, already mid-dissolve into the landscape. Calivas keeps showing up as a body that refuses to fully go under. The earth in her photographs isn’t absorbing her. It’s something she’s negotiating with, one exposure at a time, choosing how much to give it.

The gallery’s own description of the show calls Calivas’s process “embodied intuition,” language that gets repeated almost verbatim in Musée Magazine’s write-up of the exhibition, framing the burial as a kind of surrender — visual control traded for instinct. That framing is generous to the work, but it undersells the argument. Calivas isn’t surrendering anything. She’s staging a surrender while keeping the one piece of control that actually matters: the moment of exposure. The earth covers her eyes. It never covers her hand.

That distinction is also where the comparison to Anne Collier, which the Brooklyn Rail review raises as a sharper formal precedent than Mendieta, runs out of road. Collier’s “deflected self-portraiture” needs two photographic phases — a picture taken, then a second picture of that picture, mediated and re-mediated, distance built in by design. Calivas does the whole thing in one exposure: body, camera, and earth in the same instant, no second phase, no remove. The negotiation isn’t between her and a photograph of herself. It’s between her and the ground, directly.

The wider critical reception has leaned into the same idea from a different angle, with ArtNews describing the work as reinventing photography “from the ground up” — language that, intentionally or not, hands the show’s own central image back as a critical verdict. That repetition is worth noticing. When three separate pieces of writing all reach for earth, ground, and burial without coordinating, that’s usually a sign the metaphor is load-bearing in the work itself, not just a convenient way for critics to describe it.

None of this makes Mendieta irrelevant to looking at Calivas. It makes her the wrong place to land. Mendieta explains the visual vocabulary — the body, the earth, the disappearing act. She doesn’t explain what Calivas is actually doing with that vocabulary, which is closer to a refusal than a tribute. The fist on the cable release is the whole disagreement, compressed into one detail easy to miss if you’re only looking for what the photograph has in common with the work it’s quoting.

Where This Comes From

For readers who want to dig further — not citations, just the trailheads:

• Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series and earth/body performance art → History of Modern Art, Module 05: Post-War, From Paris to New York

Further Reading

The three pieces of coverage this article is responding to:

• Jane Weinstock and James Welling, “Jenny Calivas: Self-Portraits While Buried,” The Brooklyn Rail

• “Jenny Calivas: Self-Portraits While Buried | Yancey Richardson Gallery,” Musée Magazine

• “Jenny Calivas Reinvents Photography From the Ground Up,” ArtNews / Art in America