Frank Stella

Um, they were married for two years.

Um, he was also, you know, close with Philip Guston, uh, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Reinhardt, um, Frank Stella for example.

Um, and he, he met the composer Philip Glass, uh, when he was in Paris and he and Philip Glass like collaborated on a couple of things and they were-

No way

It was a big part of my life, and so I was really steeped in museum-going and gallery-going, and I was making a lot of visual art myself.

And I went to a talk, there's probably 50 people there, a small talk of the painter Frank Stella, a New York-based post-abstract expressionist painter who I really loved.

He gave the talk, and then at the end, there was the Q&A, like, and I was one of, like, maybe four people who asked questions.

I was lucky, so I got a chance to ask a question.

And I said, "What do you think about going to a museum and seeing a whole bunch of bad paintings? Do you think about how weird it is that they're getting all this attention or that they're succeeding the way they are, or what's your attitude about that?" And Frank Stella said, "I don't worry about that at all.

And I'll say further that it's not your job to spend any time or energy on art that you think is bad.

Your job as a person who's trying to become an artist is to seek out the things that inspire you and blow your mind and make you wanna make more stuff.

In this case, though, that just, like, rung a bell for me.

I mean, you know, you see what you see.

I mean, as the famous, although I'm a big fan of Frank Stella, but I think there is a-

Mm-hmm

...

And so we went and.

I think that trip changed me somehow because you hear these stories about Andy Warhol, Philip Johnson and Frank Stella and how they all would like convene on Philip Johnson's property and flounder around doing no telling what.

And it's like, you know, we left there with a sense of like these audacious creative people.

Right.

And then I think the pieces make sense.

And so that's usually the puzzle that we create is looking at what we have, but then pulling references that we feel like somehow relate to whatever we're working on, whether that's, I don't know, a project in the store, or it's a project that we're working on, where we pull these references from our travels, from history books, from architectural references, from, I don't know, our trip to Philip Johnson's glass house, where we then all pull that together.

But you're referencing Philip Johnson, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella.

You're going into Vienna, into Amsterdam, into Paris and London.

And so when you see the choice of very consciously and with determination not to mention the erasure of a female artist, you can start being a bit alarmed.

So after Anna Mendieta died, Carl André was on trial for her murder, and his friend Frank Stella paid for a very, very good, very powerful, very... expensive lawyer to defend him.

There was a gathering around Karl Andre to protect him and to protect his reputation.

He was acquitted.

And so she was not taken seriously as an artist.

body of work that she dedicated most of her adult life to was diminished and rendered a sort of a diary, a sort of a footnote.

And very quickly, Raquelin, so Anna Mendieta's sister, and other people, Anna Mendieta's friends, curators who admired her work, and then people who knew of this situation and who ended up knowing about the doubts that were immediately cast on the decision of this trial, they all started organizing themselves and trying to elaborate ways that would render the invisibilization of her work impossible.

So for those who don't know Anna Mendieta's beginnings, her life story is quite peculiar.