The controversial life story of the late Cuban-US artist Ana Mendieta is coming to the small screen. Mendieta is due to be played by the Oscar-nominated Barbie star America Ferrera in a new TV series called Naked by the Window, an adaptation of the eponymous 1990 book by Robert Katz, according to Deadline (In an Instagram post, Ferrera says she is “honoured” to produce the series; her UK agent, Hamilton Hodell, was contacted for comment).
Mendieta fell to her death from the window of the 34th-floor apartment she shared with her husband, the late Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, in Greenwich Village, New York, in 1985. Andre denied accusations that he killed his wife, insisting that Mendieta’s death was either an accident or a suicide, while others believe it was the result of an alcohol-fuelled quarrel between the two artists. In 1988, Andre was tried and acquitted on a charge of second-degree murder. In 2022, the curator Helen Molesworth revisited Mendieta’s death, and the way it divided the New York art world, in the podcast Death of an Artist.