Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta’s violent death in 1985 — where she fell 34 stories out of a New York City apartment — made headlines, and in some ways, the scandal that followed shadowed her credibility as an artist.

A new exhibit at the Des Moines Art Center, 4700 Grand Ave., showcases Mendieta’s art.

“The purpose of this exhibition is to really look at Ana’s work in a more broad, international context,” says Olga Viso, exhibition curator. “Here is an artist that needed to be up for re-evaluation and discussion.”

Viso says Mendieta really was an artist — not a sculptor, performer, photographer or painter — but an artist who should be recognized for her achievements. Although past exhibitions tend to be photographic, this exhibition weighs all aspects of her work equally.

Mendieta used a variety of media, which Viso says were influential to the land, body and feminist art of the 1970s and 1980s.

“I think, in a sense, she was under-recognized because she didn’t quite fit into any specific genre — she was utilizing all of them,” Viso says. “I think what is distinctive about her is that she was able to draw on all these different aspects.”

Mendieta incorporated very personal aspects of herself in her art, and Viso says she worked not as a Latina living in North America, but as an artist creating her own style and language.

“Ana was using her own body into the landscape, making it more human, more feminine,” Viso says. “She was relating to the earth in a human scale and inserting her body into it.”

Viso became interested in Mendieta’s art while she was a curator in Florida and says after seeing her work and meeting many artists who knew her, she grew more and more interested and began to see a little of herself in Mendieta.

“Ana is often stereotyped as a young Latina artist, and at the time, I was being typecast as a young Cuban curator,” Viso says.

Mendieta had a way of dealing with her background and heritage in a poetic form while still addressing her identity and themes of exile, yearning, discovery and regeneration, Viso says, which was inspiring to many artists struggling with identity and self-definition.

“She embraced her background, and at the same time, she didn’t have to be fully defined by it, although it was a part of her essence and her work,” Viso says.

Mendieta was born in Cuba, but because of Fidel Castro’s revolution, her parents feared their two daughters’ safety, Viso says. As a result, Mendieta was sent to Iowa as part of Operation Peter Pan, a Catholic organization that brought 14,000 children to America.

Viso says Iowa ended up being extremely influential to Mendieta’s work because of an intermediate program at the University of Iowa that encouraged strong interdisciplinary, cross-media experimentation.

“She was there at a very fertile time,” Viso says. “She went from painting very conventional self-portraits to working with her body in a performative way.”