 Hi, I'm Joshua Shannon, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art, History, and Theory at the University of Maryland, and it's a delight to be here to introduce Melanie Nguyen at this symposium. And I just want to say to all the four institutions organizing this, what a pleasure this symposium is. I love the low-key, warm atmosphere and the time that students have to exchange with one another after the papers and so on. It's just been a real pleasure. So thank you. I want to introduce Melanie to you. I'm her advisor, of course, but I've also worked with her. She was one of the teachers with me of the survey course in our history, Western Art History last semester. She came to us in 2016 having grown up in St. Louis and having earned her BA at the University of St. Louis with a major in Art History and a minor in French. And she graduated summa cum laude from there and worked for several years afterwards at the St. Louis Art Museum in a variety of different posts, including as assistant to the director of the museum. She came to us then in fall of 2016 where she earned both from the department and from the university, a very competitive fellowship, the University of Maryland flagship fellowship, which is offered only to a handful of students each year across the university. And her work here at Maryland with us has been just as impressive as the work we had seen from her undergraduate years. At Maryland, she's a remarkable citizen in the department. She's the director of the Graduate Art History Association. And she is just a fantastic teacher. She was nominated by the department and won a university-wide teaching award. And I just want to mention quickly that one of the students entered in an evaluation. And the question was, what was the most valuable thing for you in this class? What did you learn the most from? Section with Melanie, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point. So it's a pleasure to be around Melanie not only as a thinker and an intellectual but also as a pedagogue. Her talk today is developed from the MA thesis that she submitted last year on Anna Mendieta and it's called Earth Slash Body, Corporal Connection to the Natural World in Anna Mendieta's Tree of Life of 1976. Please welcome Melanie. Thank you, Dr. Shannon. And thanks to the organizers of this symposium and the other presenters. Just been a real joy to hear all of your papers today. The photograph, Arbol de la Vida or Tree of Life from 1976, has become an iconic representative of Cuban-American artist Anna Mendieta, who often depicted the human form in visceral encounters with the Earth. The work is a color photograph depicting the artist, who is nude, coated in thick, dark mud, standing with her back against a tree and her arms raised up. A notation from the artist's sketchbook describes the plan for the work as such, quote, unite or bind my body, covered with mud to the tree, end quote. The photograph was taken on an early fall day in a clearing on the banks of an area called Old Man's Creek in central Iowa, where Mendieta was studying to receive her MFA. Usually printed at an 8x10 scale, it is tightly crapped, with the figure of the artist roughly centered in the frame. A small tuft of grass is visible just below a strongly vertical tree behind her, which takes up most of the frame and occludes any further depth. This shallow composition highlights the sensuous textures in both the figure of the artist and her natural setting. Though the mud mimics the surface and coloring of the tree, the artist's body is slightly darker than the tree's bark, distinguishing it from its surroundings. The curve of the artist's body mirrors the curve of the meeting point between the two sides of the trunk of the tree behind her. Her pose, with her arms out and bent at her elbows, recalls the so-called great goddess pose that she repeats in her other work, alluding to representations of pre-modern deities or worshipers that was popular in feminist circles at this time. In this instance, though, her position also mimics the pose or character of this tree, which you can see here in this wider shot is a solid trunk that will branch out into two symmetrical sides. Within Mendetta's larger of this work is a fairly early but often reproduced example. Her signature body of work, the Silhouette series, which she produced from 1974 to 1980, is characterized by abstracted outlines of a female human figure imprinted on various outdoor surfaces. And here I show you just three examples from this wide series, the first on the far left being the earliest example, the one in the middle, roughly from the same period as Tree of Life, where the Silhouette figure is dug into sand on a beach, and then the one on the far right being kind of a later example, where the figure is simplified and she's filled it with gunpowder and lit it on fire. Several readings of this work usually reference the artist's unique biography. As a child, Mendetta was exiled from Cuba as a result of the Cuban Revolution, and during her life she asserted that in these works she attempts to reunite with her homeland and to heal her sense of placelessness. Scholars also point out her connections to feminist and Latin American artistic circles in interpreting these works. These readings tend to acknowledge the importance of a generalized conception of nature in the artist's practice, but do not treat this aspect specifically within the context of environmental history and theory. We might therefore wonder how these photographs taken outdoors and utilizing natural materials fit into the tradition of representations of the natural world in art. Being in the 1970s, the time of the beginnings of a popular environmental movement in the United States, the artist explored the ability of the body to acknowledge and experience the rest of the world, learning to appreciate its entanglement with non-human others. I argue today that in combining her intense study of both the body and the natural world, Mendetta proposes that human beings are fundamentally embedded in the natural world and the body is the locus of this connection between the human and the non-human. This exploration aligns with much recent environmental thoughts since the 1990s, notably the work of William Cronin and Timothy Morton, who posit that Western civilization's understanding of a dichotomy between humans and nature is detrimental to environmental recovery. Humans must see themselves as inherently part of nature in order to hope to protect it. To make sense of Mendetta's photograph from 1976, let us recall the historical circumstances in which this work was being produced, and particularly for our purposes, the context of the environmental movement. Historical events in the 1960s and 70s opened the eyes of the general public in the United States to the problems of unbridled industrialism. These included the publication of Rachel Carson's popular book on the extensive use of synthetic pesticides, The Silent Spring in 1962, and environmental disasters such as the Cuyahoga River in Ohio catching fire in 1969. On the heels of these events came major structural changes, including the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970. These developments saturated American culture, bringing environmentalism into the mainstream of public consciousness. This cultural milieu sheds new light on the work of Anna Mendetta, particularly if we recall her documented awareness of and appreciation for environmental concerns. For example, we know that in class meetings, she discussed the recent development of land art with her colleagues in the Intermediate Program at the University of Iowa. Other students in the program particularly remember discussing Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, an influential work of land art situated on the northern shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. We also know that later on in her career, she was on the editorial board for a 1981 issue of the feminist journal Heresies titled Earth Keeping, Earth Shaking, which focused on the role of feminism in the environmental movement. The issue included a piece on Rachel Carson and discussions of topics such as factory farming and renewable energy. The Mendetta herself published a photograph and short story in the issue. Tree of Life takes great care to highlight in particular the position of the physical body within the natural world, and we know that Mendetta was very much interested in the role of the body in the work of art. First of all, body art was a primary orientation for the Intermediate Program where she received her education. There students discussed the work of Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, and the Viennese actionists among others. In her first years in the program, Mendetta became affiliated with avant-garde director Robert Wilson's long silent play Deaf Man Glance. Rehearsals for the production were conducted in daily workshops offered by Wilson where he taught body movement and awareness. This training, as well as the rest of her education in the Intermediate Program, gave her the skills and stamina needed to enact extended performances but also conveyed the importance of the body in expression. In interviews and artist statements, Mendetta acknowledged the importance of the body in her work. She also suggested that in observing the photographic documentation of her performances, viewers would be able to imagine themselves in a depicted scenario. She said, quote, the viewer of my work may or may not have had the same experience as myself, but perhaps my images can lead the audience to speculate on their own experiences of what they might feel I have experienced. Their minds can be triggered so that the images I present retain some of the quality of actual experience. This statement by the artist and the work itself demonstrate an intentional foregrounding of the perceptual body in the hopes that her audience might also imagine themselves in a similar situation. To further understand the importance of the experiencing body in this work, we can look at several other photographs that remained unpublished until after the artist's death. Because these are the slides just before Tree of Life, they were likely taken around the same date, either earlier that day or in the days just prior. Here we see again the artist coated in a thick layer of mud, reclining with her arms upraised on top of a large tree trunk. Ten images of which I show you two document this performance in succession. This allows the viewer to witness change over time. In one, the artist's body is centered in the frame, and we can see her lying on the trunk covered in wet mud that has been applied so thickly as to blur the contours of her body. Later in the series, another image from a slightly different angle represents her in this same position. The mud in this image, however, has dried to the point that it is almost an exact match to the color and texture of the trunk. This drying highlights the time that has elapsed. The artist has clearly remained in the same position for a considerable amount of time. Because these works were never printed, we can perhaps assume that in the artist's mind this series was a study, a test run, or perhaps even a rehearsal, acclimating the body to the feel of wet earth, the pose of upraised arms, and the feeling of convergence with the natural world. We can thus consider the two works at Old Man's Creek in 1976, Tree of Life, and the unpublished series documenting the extended performance to be experiments in the ways in which the body acts as the point of contact between the human and the non-human. The thick coating of mud not only created a wonderfully textured set of photographs, but also likely inspired a rich abundance of tactile sensation within the artist herself. Over time, for example, the small nuances of the bark of the tree would have become more perceptible to the exposed skin of her back. Her pose, too, suggests an attempt to mimic the existence of a tree. Particularly in the image on the right, with her arms lifted up in the air and her legs together, she might have attempted to simulate the lived experience of a tree that is grounded in the earth with a thick trunk but reaches up and out into its environs with its branches. Holding this position for an extended period of time or repeating it for each shot would reinforce this encounter, and as the artist stated herself, her intention was to evoke a similar experience in the viewer. This bodily listening process is highly unusual in traditional representations of the natural world, particularly landscapes. Let us consider, as an example, Ansel Adams, who was perhaps the most recognized environmentally minded artist of the 20th century. In this image from Grand Canyon National Park in 1942, he captures a river winding through a valley below the Teton Mountain Range. The photographs raised vantage point, deep recession in space, and expressive weather pattern gives the impression of a pristine, sublime landscape. While this work fosters an appreciation for the beauty of the natural world, its detached, omniscient viewpoint may actually reinforce a perceived separation between nature on one side and the human mind on the other. Although we can find very few visual similarities between this work and that of Anna Mendieta, the latter implicitly challenges this dualistic understanding of the natural world. Mendieta's works from Old Man's Creek plunge the artist and, by extension, the viewer bodily into the landscape, experiencing it from within. She also rejects the pleasure of appreciating the natural world, evident in representations of nature, such as Adam's photographs. In Mendieta's image, we can see the struggle of this experience, of being unable to see, straining to hold the weight of her upraised arms, perhaps also struggling to breathe. She's not passively appreciating the non-human other, but is instead attempting to merge with it to her great discomfort. Within the context of environmentalism, Mendieta's work allows us to question traditional understandings of non-human nature and the place of humanity within it. Mendieta's experiments in these works aim to reproduce the unique forms of bodily existence of other beings. In performing these other beings, she attempts to discover the similitudes between the human experience and that of non-humans. By taking the pose of a tree, covering herself in mud, Mendieta opened herself up to new understandings of her own body and those of other forms of existence. In seeing these works, viewers may be more aware of their own embodied existence and imagine similar perceptions within themselves. The longer tradition of depicting the natural world and Western art implicitly upholds a harsh binary separating nature from humans. Anna Mendieta, by contrast, emphasizes the affinity, even the fundamental physical similarity of humans to everything else in the natural world. These works continue to have great relevance today, in a time of great uncertainty about the future of the environment. If we see the natural world as an object or an other needing our care, solutions to this problem can only ever be temporary. However, if we view ourselves as just as much part of nature as any other species, we may gain a deeper understanding of our intimacy with the whole and the importance of protecting it. Thank you.