Ana Mendieta Estate Heads to Marian Goodman, After Three Decades at Galerie Lelong

Marian Goodman Gallery will now represent the estate of Ana Mendieta, the pioneering Cuban-born multidisciplinary artist. The gallery will mount its first Mendieta exhibition in November in New York, ahead of a major Tate Modern retrospective next year.

As part of the agreement, the estate will continue to work with Alison Jacques in London and Prats Nogueras Blanchard in Barcelona and Madrid, but will depart Galerie Lelong, which represented Mendieta’s work for over three decades.

“With exciting new projects ahead and increasing momentum around the work, we realized that we needed a larger gallery—one that could help us carry Ana’s legacy into the future and meet the demands of this next chapter,” said Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, the artist’s niece, who has been the estate’s administrator since 2013.

“It’s a huge honor for us to work with the estate of Ana Mendieta,” Junette Teng, a partner at Marian Goodman Gallery, told ARTnews. “Her work is deeply personal and universally resonant, while also conceptually rigorous, which makes her a natural fit for our program. She really expanded the possibilities of what art could be.”

Mendieta, who was born in Havana in 1948 and sent to Iowa during the Cuban Revolution, is best known for her multidisciplinary “earth-body” works exploring themes of migration, spirituality, and humanity’s relationship with the natural world. She used site-specific materials to insert the human form into nature, often incorporating her silhouette or employing her body as a canvas. She then documented these ephemeral interventions with photographs and Super 8 footage, which are exhibited today.

During her lifetime, Mendieta earned a Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work was commissioned by private collectors and acquired by institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Following Mendieta’s untimely death in September 1985, at the age of 36, her older sister Raquelín worked with a committee of the artist’s friends and peers to organize a 1987 retrospective at the New Museum in New York. In 1991, Mendieta’s estate began its long partnership with Lelong, which had just opened a New York branch, led by Mary Sabbatino, its vice president and partner.

“Mary Sabbatino and I developed a relationship that was more than just a partnership—we became like family,” Raquelín Mendieta told ARTnews in an email. “I’m extremely grateful to Mary for recognizing the importance of Ana’s work early on, and for all of the wonderful years of collaboration between the estate and the gallery.” To date, the artist’s work has appeared in over 600 group shows and over 55 solo exhibitions, including 16 museum retrospectives.

In recent years, public awareness around Mendieta’s life and work has grown, due in part to a wave of media projects developed without the estate’s support. Last November, Mendieta’s work set a new auction record at Christie’s, where an untitled 1985 wood sculpture sold for $756,000, marking the third record for her art set in 12 months.

Raquel Cecilia believes that contemporary viewers are responding to the universal, timely questions in her aunt’s work: “‘Who are we? Where do we come from? Where do we belong?’”

“There’s a search for some kind of spiritual and cultural grounding” in today’s cultural and political landscape, added Rose Lord, a partner at Marian Goodman.

But all of this attention means new demands on both the estate and the gallery representing it; licensing and loan requests have surged, and, Raquel Cecilia said, “we have museums who are interested in installing some of Ana’s site-specific works, which we’ve never done before.” In July 2026, the Tate Modern will present a significant retrospective of the artist’s paintings, photographs, films, sculptures, and earthworks, bringing several pieces to the UK for the first time.

“Ana would have been very excited and proud to be in a gallery that represents Robert Smithson and [Giuseppe] Penone, amongst other artists there who are aligned with her work,” Raquelín wrote about Marian Goodman’s roster. “She also would have felt gratified to know that her work has resonated for so many years and continues to reach new audiences—that the public has engaged not only with her art, but with the ideas behind it.”