Speaker 1: Pushkin that this show contains adult language and occasional descriptions
Speaker 1: of violence. Please keep that in mind when choosing when
Speaker 1: and where to listen. Previously on Death of an Artist.
Speaker 1: She was very magnetic, but she was also very very argumentative,
Speaker 1: and so often people would end up in a fight
Speaker 1: with her. Yeah, Carl, Carl can be really quite nice
Speaker 1: and wonderful, except when he drinks too much, he becomes
Speaker 1: the doctor jacquet Worth emergency. Yeah. Yes, my wife has
Speaker 1: committed suicide. We had a chorl about the fact that
Speaker 1: I was more exposed to the public. That she went
Speaker 1: to the bedroom and I went after her, and she
Speaker 1: went out of the window. In twenty fourteen, I made
Speaker 1: a pilgrimage to one of the holy sites of the
Speaker 1: art world, Dia Beacon. DIA is a sprawling museum housed
Speaker 1: in an old Nibisco factory in New York's Hudson River Valley.
Speaker 1: It holds one of the most impressive collections of minimal
Speaker 1: and conceptual art in the world. The work is always
Speaker 1: perfectly installed, the vibe is one of purity, more than
Speaker 1: anywhere else in the country. DIA stands for the belief
Speaker 1: that art speaks for itself. That it doesn't need institutional interpretation.
Speaker 1: There are no wall labels, no bells and whistles designed
Speaker 1: to lure people in. It's a place for true believers,
Speaker 1: for artists, and for hardcore art lovers like myself to
Speaker 1: go and look. It's a place for art for art's sake.
Speaker 1: DIA had just opened the first ever American retrospective of
Speaker 1: one of the fathers of minimalism, Carl Andre. I was
Speaker 1: in the midst of being courted for my dream job,
Speaker 1: a chief curator position in my favorite American city, Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: His fate would have it, it turned out that the
Speaker 1: person doing the courting was also the person responsible for
Speaker 1: the Carl Andre retrospective at DIA, so it seemed like
Speaker 1: a good idea to see the show. I entered an
Speaker 1: enormous open gallery. It was filled with both natural daylight
Speaker 1: and Andre's minimal sculptures metal plates arranged in a checkerboard
Speaker 1: pattern on the refurbished hardwood floors. It was breathtaking. There
Speaker 1: were large rectangular pieces of cedars stacked in piles that
Speaker 1: resembled staircases, a large table dotted with little sculptures made
Speaker 1: of assembled bits and bobs, all with witty titles, terse
Speaker 1: poems typed in caps on an old typewriter, or handwritten
Speaker 1: in block mechanical lettering on graph paper, each letter perfectly
Speaker 1: occupying one square. After I got my bearings, I asked
Speaker 1: one of the security guards where the start of the
Speaker 1: exhibition was. He said there wasn't one. You could just
Speaker 1: start wherever. I was a little disappointed. I love a
Speaker 1: story with a beginning, middle, and end. As I resigned
Speaker 1: myself to just wandering around, my ego was too busy
Speaker 1: fantasizing about that job in La to give room to
Speaker 1: any of the questions in the back of my mind.
Speaker 1: What happens when the art and ideas we once thought
Speaker 1: were radical suddenly seemed stayed conventional, old fashioned? Even did
Speaker 1: a man like Andrea deserve to be celebrated, worshiped, even
Speaker 1: at a place like Dia? And what about Anamndieta. I
Speaker 1: might have been avoiding these questions, but other people were
Speaker 1: asking them, and they were angry. I'm your host, Helen
Speaker 1: Molesworth and from Pushkin Industries, something Else and Sony Music Entertainment.
Speaker 1: This is Death of an Artist, Episode two. What the
Speaker 1: Wall label Doesn't tell You? After Carl called nine one one.
Speaker 1: The police showed up, expecting to find the aftermath of
Speaker 1: a suicide, but when they arrived things seemed off. The
Speaker 1: brought Carl to the station, where two detectives began questioning him.
Speaker 1: Detective Richard Nieves still remembers it. What he said to
Speaker 1: nine to eleven was different than he told us in
Speaker 1: the nine one one call. Carl had told the operator
Speaker 1: that he and Anna had had a fight about who
Speaker 1: was more famous, and then he said, quote, I went
Speaker 1: after her and she went out the window. But now
Speaker 1: he told us that he didn't know what happened to her.
Speaker 1: She just disappeared with two detectives in front of him.
Speaker 1: He said he'd stayed up watching TV after Anna went
Speaker 1: to bed, and that when he went into the bedroom
Speaker 1: to join her, he realized she was not in the apartment.
Speaker 1: No mention of any argument. We confronted him on that
Speaker 1: that he had two different stories, and he just said, well,
Speaker 1: I said what I said, and that was it. It's
Speaker 1: like he was trying maybe to tell us that, you know,
Speaker 1: just take my word for it and shut up, and
Speaker 1: that's it. That's all I'm going to say. Meanwhile, an
Speaker 1: officer got a statement from the doorman of a nearby building.
Speaker 1: He had been on his way to get some coffee
Speaker 1: at the deli below Carl's high rise apartment. That's when
Speaker 1: he heard a woman's voice pleading no, no, no, from
Speaker 1: somewhere above. A few seconds later, the doorman heard what
Speaker 1: sounded like an explosion. The deli night manager said he
Speaker 1: heard it too, but it sounded more like a thud,
Speaker 1: something landing on the roof of the deli. Anna had fallen.
Speaker 1: And then there were the scratches. Nievis and his colleague,
Speaker 1: a veteran detective named Ron Finelli, asked Carl about a
Speaker 1: scratch on his nose. Carl said it had happened over
Speaker 1: a week ago. He said that a straw gust of
Speaker 1: wind when he was out in the terrorist said, shoved
Speaker 1: the door into his face. But you know, a week
Speaker 1: ago we would have been scabbed and tried. But that
Speaker 1: the scratch, it looked pretty new to me. Carl, still
Speaker 1: at the police station, agreed to return to his apartment
Speaker 1: with the detectives. Detective Nieves noticed that the bedroom was
Speaker 1: in disarray, an overturned chair, tossled bedclothes, and in the
Speaker 1: kitchen there were several empty wine and champagne bottles, and
Speaker 1: one other thing stood out for Detective Nieves, the window sill.
Speaker 1: The weather was pretty high. I understand that she was
Speaker 1: a short woman, and in order for her to jump,
Speaker 1: she would have had to go upon a chair on
Speaker 1: the edge of the bed but accidentally fall from that.
Speaker 1: Now it's it's unless she was setting up there, which
Speaker 1: I understand that she was afraid of heights, so us
Speaker 1: that was not possible. As they spoke, Carl offered to
Speaker 1: show the dectives a catalog of his work. I just
Speaker 1: looked at it, and he was proud of it, and
Speaker 1: you know, and he was saying that he was more
Speaker 1: successful than she was. But then again, he was older
Speaker 1: and he had many, you know, more years of experience.
Speaker 1: The crime scene squad dusted for prints and took photographs.
Speaker 1: Carl asked the cops if he could make some phone calls,
Speaker 1: and then he phoned several friends to cancel dinner plants.
Speaker 1: At no point did Carl attempt to call on his
Speaker 1: family to break the news. By this time, the two
Speaker 1: detectives were starting to feel like they had a murder
Speaker 1: on their hands. I knew he was guilty. He was
Speaker 1: just covering up. He was guilty of just kind of
Speaker 1: picking her up and just you know, just throwing her
Speaker 1: out the window. She landed in between the Delhi and
Speaker 1: the Chinese takeout. It may have been the crime scene
Speaker 1: unit that said if she fell, she would have fell here,
Speaker 1: not over there. The police decided to take Carl back
Speaker 1: to the station for more questioning. Word began to spread
Speaker 1: that something terrible had happened to Anna and that Carl
Speaker 1: was about to be arrested. A group of Carl's close friends,
Speaker 1: many of whom were major players in the art world,
Speaker 1: sprung into action. Toby We went to a police station
Speaker 1: to ask what had happened, not just myself, but various
Speaker 1: and sundry other friends. That's Lawrence Wiener, tall, bird, thin,
Speaker 1: notoriously funny, a man who almost always had a cigarette
Speaker 1: in either his mouth or his hand. He was a
Speaker 1: much loved conceptual artist and one of Carl's oldest friends.
Speaker 1: He helped Carl find a lawyer, any lawyer, and fast. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: there would be three different lawyers who would come to
Speaker 1: Carl's aid. First up was Jerry Rosam. Lawyers like want
Speaker 1: to get their nose into the tent as soon as possible.
Speaker 1: He would trying to get control of the case. I
Speaker 1: didn't have that, you know feeling, is it thought that
Speaker 1: that here was a really important artist in need of
Speaker 1: some kind of help. At the police station, an assistant
Speaker 1: DA had shown up, a young woman named Martha Bashford.
Speaker 1: She made sure Carl understood his rights, requested photography of
Speaker 1: the scratches not only on his face, but on his
Speaker 1: upper left arm as well, and asked if he would
Speaker 1: be willing to have their conversation videotaped. Just then, Carl's
Speaker 1: lawyer showed up. My advice to the Carl was to
Speaker 1: not go any further with any video statements. From a
Speaker 1: legal point of view, I thought that he would wasn't
Speaker 1: appropriate for him to do. Carl took his lawyer's advice
Speaker 1: and declined to make a videotape statement. He also said
Speaker 1: he didn't want to be photographed. When the assistant DA
Speaker 1: heard Carl was refusing both a video statement and having
Speaker 1: his picture taken, that's when Marsh I've said, f you
Speaker 1: if he's under arrest now. He didn't have a choice,
Speaker 1: and the detective found another scratch, this time on his back,
Speaker 1: right below his neck. After pictures were taken, Carl was
Speaker 1: arraigned and sent to Rikers. Meanwhile, his lawyers were already
Speaker 1: working to bail him out. And I just made an
Speaker 1: argument that he was a very famous artist, and they
Speaker 1: had like a half million dosworth of art in New York,
Speaker 1: and that all of this was substantial collateral. That basically
Speaker 1: there was no way for him to go into hiding
Speaker 1: because he was such a public person, even though you're
Speaker 1: a judge had probably never heard of him, but you're
Speaker 1: this is an esoteric art, world contemporary art. So I
Speaker 1: was able to portray that to the judge. Of the
Speaker 1: judge set Bay Twitter fifty thousand dollars, Carl's second lawyer,
Speaker 1: Jerry Ordivar, was tasked with getting a quarter million dollars
Speaker 1: of bail money. They called someone who liew of Andre
Speaker 1: and would be sympathetic and who would have the funds
Speaker 1: or the cloud to get the funds. The turn to
Speaker 1: fifty thousand dollars and he called his bank and they
Speaker 1: delivered a check to me. That person was Carl's equally
Speaker 1: famous friend, the legendary painter Frank Stella. Stella had made
Speaker 1: history with a game changing suite of black paintings made
Speaker 1: by dipping your average hardware store brush into a can
Speaker 1: of house paint and then meticulously covering the canvas with
Speaker 1: stripes of black paint. Both Andrea and Stella had attended
Speaker 1: the same prep school, though their friendship started in earnest
Speaker 1: when they moved to New York in hopes of becoming artists.
Speaker 1: Stella was rich and famous, and in this instance he
Speaker 1: was also generous and loyal. He worked with some of
Speaker 1: Carl's other friends to gather the bail money as fast
Speaker 1: as possible, and so the lawyer headed to Rikers to
Speaker 1: pick up Carl along with a two hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: thousand dollar check and two passengers, artist Lawrence Weiner and
Speaker 1: the renowned art dealer Paula Cooper. Paula was and still
Speaker 1: is Carl's gallerist more than anyone else. Paula was the
Speaker 1: person who made sure that Carl had a place to
Speaker 1: show his work to the public and to sell it
Speaker 1: to maintain his livelihood. She's legendary because she was the
Speaker 1: first person to set up shop in Soho, and she's
Speaker 1: always been beloved by artists because of her commitment to
Speaker 1: new ideas. Carl waited in a cell away from the
Speaker 1: general population, special treatment because of his art world fame.
Speaker 1: They bailed him out, and Lawrence Weener recalled the somber
Speaker 1: drive back from jail. There's four people sitting in a
Speaker 1: car in absolute shock. The truth was just the most
Speaker 1: horrendous situation. No, Carl is a very private man, and
Speaker 1: the only thing he ever expressed to me was this
Speaker 1: deep sense of loss that Anna wasn't there. According to Lawrence,
Speaker 1: there was no discussion about what happened to Anna. I
Speaker 1: don't intrude on my friends, and that's not the kind
Speaker 1: of thing you can intrude on it. There are two questions.
Speaker 1: You asked, you know what happened, and somebody says no,
Speaker 1: and then they say that there's a deep sense of loss.
Speaker 1: They really are totally broken up about it. And that's
Speaker 1: the end of it. What else is there to say,
Speaker 1: I confess this comment stuns me. This instinct to be silent,
Speaker 1: to never talk about it, to sweep it under the rug,
Speaker 1: to think there's nothing more to discuss. I find this
Speaker 1: disturbed because silence would ultimately be Carl's legal strategy, and
Speaker 1: it's set the template for the art world silence in
Speaker 1: the decades that followed. To understand how Carl came to
Speaker 1: have friends with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in
Speaker 1: their back pocket, lawyers at the ready, and then know
Speaker 1: how to get their friends sprung from jail before you
Speaker 1: had to spend too many hours at rikers. I'm going
Speaker 1: to have to take you back to the beginning. I'll
Speaker 1: tell you the story the way Carl told it in
Speaker 1: an interview for Art Forum. I was born in Quincy, Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: many many years ago. I always liked art class. Whenever
Speaker 1: I said that to my parents, boy, I loved art class,
Speaker 1: and my father was thinking, of course, let's clay. Carl's
Speaker 1: father was an immigrant from Sweden who worked as a
Speaker 1: marine raftsman at Quincy's famous shipyards. He read poetry at
Speaker 1: the dinner table and forbade his wife to work. Carl
Speaker 1: described his childhood playing in the salt marshes of northern
Speaker 1: Massachusetts as quote almost Ferrell. He excelled in his public
Speaker 1: elementary school and earned himself a full scholarship to one
Speaker 1: of the East Coast's most prestigious private schools, Phillips and
Speaker 1: Over Academy. Even though Frank Stella was one of cars
Speaker 1: Phillips Academy classmates, they didn't meet until after Carl moved
Speaker 1: to New York in nineteen fifty seven. Frank even let
Speaker 1: Carl use his studio for a while. Around this time,
Speaker 1: Carl was mostly writing poetry and made his living working
Speaker 1: on freight trains. His four year stint working the railroad,
Speaker 1: his friendship with Frank Stella, and his childhood and Quincy
Speaker 1: would all become part of his legend. Here he is
Speaker 1: reading one of his poems. He has Quincy Index one,
Speaker 1: a list of words describing his birthplace. Abigail Academy, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Artery,
Speaker 1: Atlantic Bay, Bethlem Black's Blue, Boston, Brave, broad Book. Carl
Speaker 1: wrote poetry throughout his career, but it would be the
Speaker 1: sculpture that really got him noticed. Here he is in
Speaker 1: a documentary about minimalism. He's the first of eleven artists,
Speaker 1: all white, all men. He explains how he finds materials
Speaker 1: to put together, usually sometime once a day. I'm walking
Speaker 1: along Mercy Street, walking between the post office and the gallery.
Speaker 1: We see Carl walking in a relatively derelict street in Soho,
Speaker 1: which in the nineteen sixties was still a light manufacturing neighborhood,
Speaker 1: not yet home to fancy renovated lofts and the art
Speaker 1: galleries of the nineteen eighties or the glorified shopping mall
Speaker 1: it's become today. While walking, Carl finds five or six
Speaker 1: rectangular metal plates, which he assembles into a line on
Speaker 1: the pavement. Now, this is absolutely like gold. Define these
Speaker 1: because these are the materials of which I actually make
Speaker 1: my sculptures. I really like the elements, the aluminum and copper,
Speaker 1: magnesium and steel and lead and zinc. As we watch
Speaker 1: him nudge the plates into alignment with his foot, we
Speaker 1: see the new art and the new artist at work.
Speaker 1: Nothing is fixed, no bolts, no welding. The pieces are
Speaker 1: simply placed or stacked. Everything can be picked up and
Speaker 1: moved around. Nothing is permanent. The act of assembling the
Speaker 1: work and the act of walking on it or looking
Speaker 1: at it are almost the same. All of the acts
Speaker 1: ask you to think about the space you are in
Speaker 1: and how that space exists, both before and after your
Speaker 1: arrival and departure. This refusal to make anything like a monument,
Speaker 1: or anything permanent, or anything that related to what things
Speaker 1: looked like before was completely mind blowing for folks inside
Speaker 1: the art world. I remember in sixty five having a
Speaker 1: real epiphany. I warked into the galler and there were
Speaker 1: piles of bricks on the floor, and I thought, oh, oh,
Speaker 1: there's some construction going on. And I started to leave
Speaker 1: the gallery and then I thought, wait a minute, what
Speaker 1: if it's art? And I went and aft and it
Speaker 1: went art, and I got so excited. It was like
Speaker 1: a like a revolutionary moment. This is Peter Sheldall, who,
Speaker 1: even at eighty years old, as the enthusiasm and sprightly
Speaker 1: energy of a teenager. He's the renowned art critic for
Speaker 1: The New Yorker, though back then he was mostly writing
Speaker 1: for The Village Voice. It was literal in the world,
Speaker 1: real stuff, you know. Form was condensed to tidiness, and
Speaker 1: it was about me. It was about my presence barking
Speaker 1: around these things. It was such a cleanliness and dignity
Speaker 1: and insolence about it. I got a sense of a
Speaker 1: revolution and that I was here at the start. It
Speaker 1: was something that shifted, shifted to culture. You know. I
Speaker 1: was like a pivot and nothing that's quite the same afterwards.
Speaker 1: That's high praise coming from someone who saw almost every
Speaker 1: exhibition there was to see in New York during the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties and seventies. But then Peter actually met Carl
Speaker 1: when I'm matt him did not like him. You know
Speaker 1: what he would say, Prima Donna and a bully. In
Speaker 1: the before times, like before the Internet, even the New
Speaker 1: York art world basically revolved around a handful of bars
Speaker 1: and restaurants in Lower Manhattan. Bars such as the Cedar
Speaker 1: Tavern and Max's Kansas City regularly get name checked in
Speaker 1: the art history books. The basic template remained the same.
Speaker 1: An art bar is a kind of divy bar where
Speaker 1: you just show up and know that folks would be there.
Speaker 1: In my day, it was the Shark Bar on Prince Street.
Speaker 1: Once they're people, okay, mostly men, raged on about this
Speaker 1: that or the other art theory and so and so's
Speaker 1: latest exhibition or whatever exhibition review had been published in
Speaker 1: last week's New York Times. Bars were where high stakes
Speaker 1: ideas and strongly held feelings got mixed with politics and
Speaker 1: booze to get sorted out in a major way. And
Speaker 1: so at one of these art bars Peter and Carl met.
Speaker 1: I started talking to him, and he said, you're like
Speaker 1: Frank O'Hara, right, Frank O'Hara was a prominent poet as
Speaker 1: well as a young curator at the Museum of Modern Art.
Speaker 1: And then he started running down Frank O'Hara, and I
Speaker 1: gave him the finger and laid my finger up an
Speaker 1: indoctive nose, and you know, and I'm still marveling that
Speaker 1: he didn't kill me. I mean he could have. He
Speaker 1: was a strong man. I mean, it's right, and I was.
Speaker 1: I was a skinny poet and we were drunk. I
Speaker 1: was drunk. Did you continue to see andre in bars?
Speaker 1: I see him, but but not not talked to him.
Speaker 1: Disavoided him. You avoided it. Real Peter's version of the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties art world sounds like West Side Story, complete
Speaker 1: with rival art gangs scoping out different parts of SOHO,
Speaker 1: and much of the action took place at Max's Kansas City.
Speaker 1: The division was between the Warhole people and the minimalist people.
Speaker 1: The minimalist people were on the front along the bar,
Speaker 1: and the Warhole people were in the back room. And
Speaker 1: I could say that going in was like walking past
Speaker 1: heavy metal to Strawberry Shortcake. And I went to the
Speaker 1: Warhold people. I'm not sure how much the Insider Baseball
Speaker 1: is translating here, so for those of you who aren't
Speaker 1: up to speed on your art world posses. Shortcake refers
Speaker 1: to Warhole's notoriously Swiss friends as they were called back
Speaker 1: in the day, meaning gay people and anyone on the
Speaker 1: fringe of white masculinity circa nineteen sixty You went to
Speaker 1: the Shortcake, Yeah, well, I mean it was I felt
Speaker 1: comfortable there. All the minimums are ashall Robert's mission, well, Donald, Judge, Jesus, Hey,
Speaker 1: I'll accept shallow wit who was an angel in human form.
Speaker 1: What a wonderful guy. Okay, back to the main story.
Speaker 1: The other thing Carl was getting noticed for were his politics.
Speaker 1: He was an important member of the art Workers Coalition.
Speaker 1: Art historian Julia Brian Wilson describes it this way. Artworkers
Speaker 1: Coalition was a brief lived artists rights organization that came
Speaker 1: together in nineteen sixty nine, originally around issues of kind
Speaker 1: of artists rights visa VI the museum and the institution.
Speaker 1: Does the museum have the right to display an artist's
Speaker 1: work in a way that the artist doesn't want or intent,
Speaker 1: and very quickly demanded a whole slate of things that
Speaker 1: included more representation around African American artists and Puerto Rican artists.
Speaker 1: Carl was known as the resident Marxist of the group.
Speaker 1: He was the one who seemed to have actually read
Speaker 1: Carl Marx. I probably first read Carl's Artworkers Coalition Statement
Speaker 1: and grad school, and I'm just as enthralled with it
Speaker 1: now as I was then. It's so badass. The problem,
Speaker 1: he says, is not museums, but this baggy thing called
Speaker 1: the art world, a world he thinks should cease to exist.
Speaker 1: No galleries standing in between the artist and the collector,
Speaker 1: no critic in between the artists and the public, just
Speaker 1: artists making work for themselves and anyone else who shows
Speaker 1: up with interest and curiosity. Written in nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 1: it's still a kind of utopia I could get behind.
Speaker 1: The Fact is Carl might not have always been well liked,
Speaker 1: but damn if he didn't have good politics. There was
Speaker 1: Carl the anti war activist and Carl the Artworker's Coalition activist,
Speaker 1: and there was also the Carl who sent checks to
Speaker 1: feminist causes. Between his groundbreaking work, his sharp tongue, and
Speaker 1: that he showed at the trailblazing Paula Cooper Gallery. All
Speaker 1: of this contributed to a reputation that was hard to
Speaker 1: be denied. But Carl's official biography, the one that would
Speaker 1: appear in every exhibition catalog about his work, started and
Speaker 1: stopped with Quincy and the railroad job. And this is
Speaker 1: pretty much the standard of how artists were discussed, birthplace, school,
Speaker 1: other important men they knew, with little to no mention
Speaker 1: of the wives, lovers, or children they spent their lives with.
Speaker 1: Carl Andre spent six years of his life with Anna Mendieta.
Speaker 1: Anna was born into a well to do family in Havana.
Speaker 1: Both of her parents, Ignacio and Raquel, came from political
Speaker 1: families dotted with generations of military men and politicians. Her father,
Speaker 1: a lawyer, carried on this tradition and was an early
Speaker 1: supporter of Fidel Castro. Their house in Havana bustled with
Speaker 1: extended family and maids and cooks. They spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time at a family beach house that has been
Speaker 1: called a mansion. It was in Varadero Beach, a long
Speaker 1: stretch of white sand that has been a resort destination
Speaker 1: for decades. Her friend Talia Delgado, whose family socialized with
Speaker 1: the Mendiettas in Varadero remembered it this way. I remember
Speaker 1: going to the beach to Bararedo, where her family used
Speaker 1: to also go. Our lives were pretty easy, filled with
Speaker 1: a lot of caretakers, an extended family, and Anna's outspokenness.
Speaker 1: Well apparently that started pretty early. She was very, very strong,
Speaker 1: determined person, even as a child. I remember telling me
Speaker 1: that whenever her parents had a fight, she would go
Speaker 1: in and spreak it up and say, I don't want
Speaker 1: to hear any more of this, because if you fight,
Speaker 1: you're going to break up, and if you break up,
Speaker 1: it's going to be terrible for me and for my siblings.
Speaker 1: So you have to really keep it together and work
Speaker 1: this out. This idyllic childhood would not last. This was
Speaker 1: the scene of turmoil in the capital Havana as the
Speaker 1: climax of revolution was reached. Anyone suspect of sympathy for
Speaker 1: the Bautista regime came in for a rough time. In
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty nine, when Anna was eleven years old, Fidel
Speaker 1: Castro's Revolutionary Army forced President Bautista out of power. At first,
Speaker 1: Anna's father was swept up in the new wave of
Speaker 1: optimism and possibility that Castro represented, and he secured his
Speaker 1: place in the new government. However, as Castro began to
Speaker 1: crack down on Cubans with ties to American businesses, Ignazio
Speaker 1: Mendieta came under fire. The collective promise that was made
Speaker 1: was slowly being taken over by a very autocratic managerial policy.
Speaker 1: This is Tanya Brigera, a Cuban artist, an activist. You've
Speaker 1: heard her as our voice of Anna, but she's also
Speaker 1: something of an expert about Cuba's autocratic policies. She's been
Speaker 1: detained several times by the Cuban authorities because of her
Speaker 1: art and her activism. At some point, Castro started deciding
Speaker 1: thing without consulting anybody. He started, you know, having an
Speaker 1: autonomy that you should not have the president. He was
Speaker 1: very clear from the nineteen fifty nine that it was
Speaker 1: with him or against him. While Anna's father maintained public
Speaker 1: support for Castro, he refused to join the Communist Party
Speaker 1: and ultimately became an elite counter revolutionary, working clandestinely to
Speaker 1: challenge Castro's power. Anna and her sister rat Clean followed
Speaker 1: in his footsteps, going so far as to hand out
Speaker 1: anti Castro leaflets. This is what Anna told a reporter
Speaker 1: in one of her very few filmed interviews Miami. Tanya translates,
Speaker 1: my grandmama politicized me since I was a younger in Cardines.
Speaker 1: She always told me all the war stories, all this
Speaker 1: story of Cuba, everything about that side of the family.
Speaker 1: By nineteen sixty, things were starting to get dangerous for
Speaker 1: the Mendietta family. Ultimately, Ignazio would be arrested and sentenced
Speaker 1: to twenty years in prison. But right before that happened,
Speaker 1: the family made the difficult decision to send Anna and
Speaker 1: her sister to the United States as part of a
Speaker 1: secret Cold War program that sent Cuban children to America.
Speaker 1: On his mother pregnant with her third child, her husband
Speaker 1: and trouble stayed behind. Please, he's from Cuba. He's going
Speaker 1: to stay here a WHI. It's a refugee camp. He's
Speaker 1: a refugee. The audio you're hearing is from a film
Speaker 1: made by the US government designed to explain to thousands
Speaker 1: of Cuban children why their parents had sent them away.
Speaker 1: When you are sending away to school for the first time,
Speaker 1: or you go away to come, everything is strange. Every
Speaker 1: body's strange. This is just an in between plays, or
Speaker 1: you wait until they find you a foster home. Somewhere
Speaker 1: in the United Anna and Raclean joined the fourteen thousand
Speaker 1: other children flown to the US as part of Operation
Speaker 1: Peter Pan. Where they landed was a far cry from
Speaker 1: never never Land. The sisters boarded a plane in tropical,
Speaker 1: cosmopolitan Havana. They eventually ended up in the flat, cold
Speaker 1: corn fields of Iowa and were immediately sent to a
Speaker 1: Catholic orphanage. They get off the plane in Iowa and
Speaker 1: this priest comes on to tell them how they're very
Speaker 1: lucky to be in the United States, and the United
Speaker 1: States has a lot of development. For example, he said,
Speaker 1: look at this, we have ballot pans. And Anna and
Speaker 1: her sister looked at each other like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: where we ended up. I mean, they knew all about
Speaker 1: poppointments in Cuba, and they were just really shocked by
Speaker 1: the lack of knowledge really of who these kids were
Speaker 1: and where they were coming from. It's hard to imagine
Speaker 1: these two sisters ripped from their beach house, their big
Speaker 1: extended family, their social status, and suddenly placed in an
Speaker 1: orphanage organized by age, which meant they were immediately separated.
Speaker 1: The sisters were shuffled through a few different foster homes
Speaker 1: and a boarding school, all of which made the temporary
Speaker 1: separation from their parents feel more and more permanent. This displacement,
Speaker 1: as emotional as it was physical, would have a profound effect.
Speaker 1: Here's Anna's friend be Ruby Rich. She's lied to about
Speaker 1: where she and her sister are being sent. They are
Speaker 1: both lied to about being kept together. They're allied to
Speaker 1: about going to a home like their own. They're allied
Speaker 1: to about everything, and over and over, every time they moved,
Speaker 1: they allied to again. So she not only has no
Speaker 1: control as a child, but she is absolutely betrayed as
Speaker 1: a child repeatedly. And I think that must have left
Speaker 1: a really deep mark. Years later, Anna described the long
Speaker 1: lasting effect of this displacement to a group of college students.
Speaker 1: Here's Tanya Brigera voicing Anna again, since I left Cuba
Speaker 1: when I was twelve because of the political situation there,
Speaker 1: that mark has marked, you know, an aspect of my life,
Speaker 1: so that I have failed, that I was torn away
Speaker 1: from the womb, from the modern land. Miraculously, despite all
Speaker 1: of this trauma, both sisters managed to graduate from high
Speaker 1: school and by the time their mother and little brother
Speaker 1: joined them nineteen sixty six, Anna had already discovered her calling.
Speaker 1: She wanted to be an artist. I think also that
Speaker 1: she's intoxicated by art making. I think it delivers her
Speaker 1: to herself in a way that nothing else had. And
Speaker 1: I think she's able there to put together all the
Speaker 1: different parts of her personality and her life and make
Speaker 1: something powerful out of that. And she'd been powerless, very
Speaker 1: powerless for a very key part of her life, and
Speaker 1: I think that part of her really needed filling up
Speaker 1: with its opposite. What happened next was one of those
Speaker 1: plot twists that can only be called fate. On a
Speaker 1: transferred to the University of Iowa, where against all the odds,
Speaker 1: she ended up enrolled in one of the most avant
Speaker 1: garde art departments in the country, led by a guy
Speaker 1: named Hans Brader. Brader came out of a super radical
Speaker 1: group of performance artists, and he was inviting all of
Speaker 1: the most cutting edge people from New York to come
Speaker 1: in lecture at the university. Brader's radical program was like
Speaker 1: a portal to another world, and Anna went right through it.
Speaker 1: He identified her energy immediately and the two became lovers yep.
Speaker 1: Anna was that girl, the super smart one, the wild one,
Speaker 1: the one that slept with the teacher. But their thing
Speaker 1: was no flash in the pam. They stayed together for years.
Speaker 1: While she was in Iowa, she moved from painting to performance.
Speaker 1: She said paintings were an illusion. They weren't real enough
Speaker 1: for her. What was real to her was trying to
Speaker 1: figure out the violence of the world around her, specifically
Speaker 1: the rape and murder that had recently happened on campus.
Speaker 1: In one performance, she invited viewers into her apartment where
Speaker 1: she was stripped down, bent over a table, and covered
Speaker 1: with animal blood. She was just as radical as the
Speaker 1: artist from New York, and that's where she was headed.
Speaker 1: In January of nineteen seventy eight, Anna moved to New
Speaker 1: York City. Hans helped her get situated by introducing her
Speaker 1: to artists, one of whom was the filmmaker Ella Troyano.
Speaker 1: Here's how Ella remembered Anna when she first arrived in Manhattan.
Speaker 1: I remember she had this notebook where she was so
Speaker 1: worried about money that she was writing down in a
Speaker 1: column every single thing that she spent money on. Every day.
Speaker 1: Anna Wood brag that she furnished her entire apartment with
Speaker 1: stuff she found on the street. Mattress and all her
Speaker 1: early years in New York were a whirlwind. She worked
Speaker 1: whatever job she could to make ends meet, and she
Speaker 1: was slowly gaining traction in the art world, appearing in
Speaker 1: group shows, making all the right connections, and eventually she
Speaker 1: met Carl. Here's ele Troiano again. You've got somebody who
Speaker 1: is in the city who totally believes an art, who
Speaker 1: is very, very poor, is working her ass off to
Speaker 1: get to situations where she can meet people that can
Speaker 1: give her a show, and she does everything right. And
Speaker 1: here is somebody all of a sudden, who, by the way,
Speaker 1: looks a little bit like Hans Braider. Looking at pictures
Speaker 1: of Carl and Hans, you can clearly see that Anna
Speaker 1: had a type. They were both stocky and bearded, bearish
Speaker 1: kind of men. When Carl came courting, some of Anna's
Speaker 1: friends even called him Hans of the East. And you know,
Speaker 1: Hans was a sweetheart, but Carl was less of a
Speaker 1: sweetheart and more of an unlikely lefario. One reporter even
Speaker 1: called him one of the art world's most notorious womanizers.
Speaker 1: You know, this guy is now wooing her the way
Speaker 1: he loves wooing with champagne, expensive dinners. And this is
Speaker 1: somebody who's writing down I have ten cents that I
Speaker 1: used to put on a stamp or whatever. That's enticing.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't just the bubbly and the coin. Carl
Speaker 1: had something much more important to offer an artist newly
Speaker 1: arrived in the city. Carl had an entry into every
Speaker 1: gallery and every museum. But I do think that she
Speaker 1: really loved him, and she thought that she knew who
Speaker 1: he was. While Carl and on his relationship went up
Speaker 1: and down, on his career was on a steady climb.
Speaker 1: She'd been getting good teaching gigs, and she was starting
Speaker 1: to win awards and grants, and then she won the
Speaker 1: prestigious pre Drome, a fellowship that came with an all
Speaker 1: expensive paid apartment and studio in Italy. It was almost
Speaker 1: too good to be true. She moved to Rome and
Speaker 1: October nineteen eighty three and immediately took to it. She
Speaker 1: loved her life in Rome. She told me that she
Speaker 1: felt that finally she could put together New York and Cuba,
Speaker 1: and it was called Roma. This is be Ruby rich again.
Speaker 1: She had so much nerve. I mean, she would pretty
Speaker 1: much do anything she wanted to do. She was not
Speaker 1: a fearful person, except interestingly when it came to heights.
Speaker 1: I want to pause here. This seems like a negligible detail,
Speaker 1: but Honest's sphere of heights would become an important part
Speaker 1: of the story. Everyone seemed to have a story about
Speaker 1: how afraid she was, But the anecdote that would make
Speaker 1: it to trial was from Marcia Pelle's, one of Anna's
Speaker 1: friends in Rome. Marsha learned about Honna's sphere of heights
Speaker 1: when they were hiking up to a friend's house at
Speaker 1: the top of a hill. She described what happened on
Speaker 1: a true crime show called City Confidential. And we start
Speaker 1: to walk up and the ocean is like a five
Speaker 1: Depp cut there, and this just a little thing of cactus.
Speaker 1: There's no fencer or anything. And we start to walk
Speaker 1: and she started to because she starts to completely freak out.
Speaker 1: And I had no idea what was wrong. And she said,
Speaker 1: I can't do this. I'm an agrophobiac. I'm petrified of heights.
Speaker 1: I can't get near the edge. So the idea that
Speaker 1: Anna had voluntarily climbed up onto the windowsill of an
Speaker 1: apartment on the thirty fourth floor. The people who knew
Speaker 1: Anna best were not buying it. Next time, on Death
Speaker 1: of an Artist, I thought it is better to tell
Speaker 1: him and say, look, I want a divorce. It never
Speaker 1: occurred to me that he would kill her. I wrote
Speaker 1: the article on the first anniversary of her death to
Speaker 1: raise the profile of the case again and make it
Speaker 1: too embarrassing for the district attorney to draw the case.
Speaker 1: At one point it was what they believe was a
Speaker 1: feminist cabal were about to get it. Sometimes people would
Speaker 1: scream at you on the street. I used jilled at
Speaker 1: him that he was a murderer. Death of an Artist
Speaker 1: is a co production between Pushkin Industries, Something Else and
Speaker 1: Sony Music Entertainment, Written and hosted by me Helen Mouldsworth.
Speaker 1: Executive producers are Lizzie Jacobs, Tom kinnig Leetel Mulad, Jacob
Speaker 1: Weissberg and Lucas Werner. Produced by Maria Luisa Tucker, editing
Speaker 1: by Lizzie Jacobs. Our managing producer is Jacob Smith. Associate
Speaker 1: producers are Pooge Rue and Eloise Linton. Additional production helped
Speaker 1: by Tally Abacassas Annamandieto's quotes were read by Tanya Brigera,
Speaker 1: engineered by Sam Baar, fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado.
Speaker 1: Our theme song is by Pooge Rue. If you love
Speaker 1: this show, consider subscribing to pushkin Plus to listen early,
Speaker 1: add free and get exclusive bonus content. Look for the
Speaker 1: Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm.
Speaker 1: Find more great podcasts from Sonymusic Entertainment at sonymusic dot com.
Speaker 1: Backslash Podcasts