artist profile

Born in Havana, Cuba in November 1948, Ana Mendieta was a well-known performance artist throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. At age 12, she and her sister were forced to flee Cuba after her father joined an anti-Castro counter-revolutionary force, and the two siblings spent their first few weeks in the United States at a refugee camp in Florida until they were sent to an orphanage in Dubuque, Iowa — a location with a culture very different from the life Ana knew back in Cuba. She wouldn’t reunite with her mother and brother for five years and her father for another 18.

“Growing up in a biracial home, with a black father and a Hispanic mother, I truly got the best of both worlds being raised in two different cultural lifestyles,” says Dominic Reed, an up-and-coming rapper from the Denver area. “But […]