Ana Mendieta was interested in blood. In part, her fascination with the stuff stemmed from the violence against women she witnessed in her lifetime, beginning when a student was raped and murdered on her college campus. But the obsession also stemmed from her knowledge of rituals practiced in the Afro-Cuban religion Santera, in which chicken's blood is offered as sacrifice. And, of course, the fact that the viscous fluid pulses through all of our veins, threading us together.

When women write, their words are often assumed to be confessional. When Ana made images, she was interpreted through a similar lens. When the radical, dynamic and irrepressible artist died under tragic and mysterious circumstances at 36 years old, her haunting work was read like an omen. But to view her work in light of her death is to miss its essence. "Her death has really nothing to do with her work ," Ana's sister Raquelin Mendieta told The Guardian. "Her work was about life and power and energy and not about death."

Ana was a Cuban-born multidisciplinary artist whose work floated weightlessly between performance, sculpture, earth art, photography and film. Born in 1948 in Havana, Cuba, she fled to the United States with her sister at a young age, eventually settling in the Midwest. Ana's work is uncanny in its ability to feel at once radically progressive and ancient, vibrating with a feminine power that stretches back to the earliest human rites.

In one of her most well known pieces, "Imagen de Yagul ," Ana documented her unclothed body in a pre-Hispanic tomb at the Mesoamerican site of Yagul, covered in a spray of white flowers. The foliage consumed her silhouette, obscuring her body and rendering her an otherworldly hybrid. In her 1974 piece, "Body Tracks," Ana created a wall drawing on camera, drenching her forearms in blood and slowly dragging them down a white wall. The resulting imprint resembles the marks left by a corpse that's been dragged off screen.

Lesser known are Ana's experimental films -- on view now in "Ana Mendieta: Experimental and Interactive Films" at Galerie Lelong in New York -- despite the fact that she made over 100 throughout her lifetime. Like her more recognized performances and photographs, Ana's films are characterized by a haunting combination of presence and absence, manifested in scratches on the emulsion of celluloid film or filmed reactions to blood poured onto an unassuming sidewalk.