Raquelín Mendieta, the longtime administrator of the estate of her sister, artist Ana Mendieta, died on October 24 in Miami. She was 79. Her family said in a statement that the cause was a long illness.Ana Mendieta died in the early hours of September 8, 1985, after falling from the 34th floor of her Greenwich Village apartment, which she shared with her husband Carl Andre. (Andre was charged and ultimately acquitted of her murder, and Mendieta’s death sharply divided the New York art world.)At the time of her premature death, Ana had already completed a number of mature bodies of work, ranging from performance to film and photography. Her star was ascending, with the artist having received a Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art had recently acquired her work.The artist’s family would almost immediately be tasked with stewarding her legacy. Raquelín, who was two years older than Ana, took the leading role as the administrator of the estate on behalf of the family.“Becoming the voice of her sister’s estate for three decades, Raquelín was instrumental in creating the legacy of Ana Mendieta’s work. She helped shape how the world understands one of the most important artistic voices of the 20th Century through exhibitions, publications and events,” Raquelín’s family said in their statement announcing her passing.The first goal was to show Ana’s work, at a scale that it previously not been exhibited. Working with a committee of artists and friends of Ana’s, Raquelín worked to organize a retrospective for the artist, which opened at the New Museum in 1987 and borrowed heavily from the estate.Next up was working with a commercial gallery that would establish a market for Ana’s art, placing it both in important institutional and private collections, as well as regularly exhibiting the work both at the gallery and in museums. In Galerie Lelong and its vice president Mary Sabbatino, Raquelín found a partner, beginning in 1991. Acquisitions by museums became a priority, with the Whitney Museum acquiring two Chromogenic prints in 1992. That partnership, which Raquelín would later characterize as one that evolved into “[becoming] like family,” would also lead to Ana’s inclusion in some 600 group shows and 55 solo exhibitions, of which 16 were museum retrospectives.The research into what lay in Ana’s archives was ongoing and even Raquelín would sometimes be surprised by what they would find. A 2016 exhibition at Galerie Lelong focusing on Ana’s filmic work, for example, included works that had never been exhibited and had long been stored in their mother’s Iowa home. “We thought we knew what we had, but as it turned out, we didn’t,” Raquelín told the New York Times at the time. “It was kind of hiding right in front of us for years.” More recently, there has been another wave of interest in Ana Mendieta, more so about her biography and her death than her art, which has become firmly cemented in the art historical canon, largely in part through Raquelín’s efforts in the decades after her sister’s death.“My sister’s art was the most important thing to her (she told me that art was her religion) and watching over her legacy, I believe, helped realize her goal,” Raquelín wrote last year, reflecting on her role in the Mendieta estate. “Once I took charge of overseeing her work, I felt her very near me and guiding me, it healed the pain of her loss somewhat, because she was still in my life. As an older sibling I always watched over her, and especially after coming to this country where the only family we had was each other. So, our relationship continued on even after her death.”Raquelín Maria Mendieta was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1946 to Ignacio Alberto Mendieta, a political figure, and Raquel Oti, a chemistry teacher. Her sister, Ana, would be born two years later. (Raquelín is survived by her five children, seven grandchildren, and one brother.)In addition to their father’s political standing, the Mendieta family was “steeped in [the] politics, religion and culture” of Cuba, according to a biography compiled by Raquelín’s family. The Mendieta sister’s great uncle, Carlos Mendieta y Montefur, had been a colonel during Cuba’s war of independence from Spain, which lasted from 1895 to 1898; he later became an interim president of Cuba, from 1934–35.In 1961, Raquelín and Ana were sent to the United States as part of Operación Pedro Pan (Operation Peter Pan), along with some 14,000 unaccompanied minors fleeing the regime of Fidel Castro during a two-year period. They first arrived in Miami before being sent to Dubuque, Iowa. Until the arrival of their mother and younger brother, Raquel and Ignacio Carlos, the two young girls moved between orphanages, boarding schools and foster homes. Ignacio Alberto was detained as a political prisoner but was able to reunite with the family in the US in 1979.Early on, Raquelín also had an interest in becoming an artist, receiving a bachelor’s degree in studio art from the University of Iowa, where Ana would later attend and receive three art-related degrees between 1969 and 1977. (At one point, the two had neighboring studios in the school’s painting program.) After a divorce and with two children, Raquelín returned to the University of Iowa to pursue a master’s in education, which she received in 1977, the year Ana completed her MFA.While studying at Iowa, Ana would go on to complete some of the earliest examples of her mature works, including her now iconic “Silueta” series (1973–80), to which Raquelín was a witness to and a frequent collaborator, including assisting with the filming of Ana’s Moffitt Building Piece (1973). Raquelín said in the Times interview that Ana spent six years getting her MFA “not because she needed to stay that long but because she wanted to have access to all the materials — a Super 8 camera and film and video — that the university had and that she needed. She had very little money.”Ana’s death “greatly impacted the rest of Raquelín’s life,” the family said in their statement and Raquelín, now a mother of five, would go on to dedicate much of time over the course of the next few decades to making sure her sister’s work would not be forgotten.“I always feel like I continue to have a relationship with my sister through her work,” she told the Times in 2016. “I’ve felt very close to her through the art and I’ve known about her in ways that, even when she was alive, I didn’t really know.”That connection to Ana would also inspire Raquelín to return to art-making, using organic materials, like her sister, to create paintings, collages, and other work that merged her interests in Afro-Cuban syncretic religions, Eastern philosophies, meditation, and astrology. (She spent several months at one point pursuing these studies in India.) She moved to Miami in the last few years of her life and continued to make art.In 2013, a year in which saw three Ana Mendieta surveys, including a traveling retrospective titled “Traces” that opened at the Hayward Gallery in London, Raquelín handed over the day-to-day management of the estate to her daughter Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, who was also Ana’s goddaughter and onetime art student. Per a 2024 report in the New York Times, Ana had “encouraged her [niece] to nurture her own creativity” and shortly before her death advised Raquel Cecilia, who was 17 at the time, on her choices for college.In their statement, the Mendieta family wrote of the relationship that mother and daughter shared in stewarding Ana’s legacy, saying “The bond they shared, as family, collaborators, and guardians of something larger than themselves, was extraordinary. Raquelín will be deeply missed, but the care and conviction she instilled in her daughter ensure that her life’s work will continue with the same love and integrity that defined it.”Earlier this year, the Ana Mendieta Estate departed Galerie Lelong after three decades. “I’m extremely grateful to Mary [Sabbatino] 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,” Raquelín told ARTnews by email at the time.The estate joined Marian Goodman Gallery, which will open its first Mendieta solo this week. Of that decision, Raquelín said, “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. 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.”