As innovative as his sculpture, Andre's visually oriented poetry, however, has yet to receive the same rigor of attention as his sculpture. His inventive use of poetic and visual form, which he described as poetry mapped onto the visual arts, provides a compelling example of the interrelationship of word and image, a practice, although often overlooked, that suffuses twentieth-century visual art and poetry. Whereas Andre produced approximately 1,500 poems over many decades, this project focuses on his Words installation, the largest permanently installed collection of Andre's poems in the world. In 1995, Andre gifted 465 pages of poetry to the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Andre's experiments with genre, including lyrics, autobiographies, novels, odes, and operas, push literary convention to the edge of irreconcilability. Despite the array of genres, I argue that all of the disparate kinds of writing found in Words demonstrate Andre's poetic sensibility. Until recently the critical discussion of Andre's poems proceeded as a one-sided discourse, which advanced the notion that this large body of work was best suited to enhancing the understanding of Andre's sculptural practice. To redress the one-sidedness of the discourse requires approaching Andre not only as a sculptor who made poems, but also as a poet deeply engaged in the visual qualities of his poetics. Engaging the spirit of the "make it new" sensibility of modernist poetics, Andre developed his own practice by "mapping language on the conventions and usages of 20thcentury abstract art."¹ Andre's poetry operates in the space between art and language. In this space we find Andre's engagement with poetic history, particularly the innovations of Ezra Pound, his relationship to important poetic developments such as fragmentation and quotation, and his experimentation with poetry as a visual medium. An examination of Andre's poetic oeuvre, the publication and exhibition history of his poems, and the manner of critical attention given to the poems from the 1960s onward contextualizes Andre's practice of mapping poetry onto the visual arts, while also bridging the gap in discourse between the fields of art and poetry. / text

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Ana Mendieta was a Cuban-born American artist whose unique body of work incorporated performance, activism, Earth art, installation, and the Afro-Cuban practices of Santería. She began her career at the University of Iowa, were she initially received her degree in painting in 1969. It was not until 1972 that Mendieta shifted radically to performance art. Though she was raised Catholic, she developed an interest in the rituals involved with Santería, a culturally predominant Cuban religion, and it deeply influenced her work in her choice of materials and settings. Santería is one of the major faith-based lifestyles of Cuba and is characterized by a synthesis of Afro-Cuban and Catholic characteristics, along with its own unique teachings and rituals. Also a prominent theme in Mendieta’s work was her sense of displacement and her insatiable desire to reconcile her Cuban heritage, which she attempts to resolve, not only through her art, but also during several trips to Cuba. Greater still in its contribution of influence to Mendieta’s work was the ecofeminist movement which amalgamated elements of the feminist and environmental movements; Ecofeminism’s emergence in the United States coincided with the rise of Mendieta’s career during the 1970’s. The movement focused on the correlation between the oppression, degradation, and exploitation of women and the oppression, degradation, and exploitation of the Earth. This thesis examines the life of Ana Mendieta and analyzes how her works may be viewed in an ecofeminist context. It analyzes how Mendieta’s work acts as a reflection of her cultural, social, and political reality and discusses ways in which characteristics of Santería and ecofeminism as a discourse influenced the imagery and symbolism used in Mendieta’s artwork throughout her brief career. Formal analysis of Mendieta’s artwork and contextual and historical analysis of Mendieta’s life, the ecofeminist discourse, and Afro-Cuban spirituality are explored in this research.