On a steep street snuggled below Mount Lycabettus in Athens, exuberant scribbles gleam through the window of CAN Christina Androulidaki, a small gallery whose first show of the fall is atypical of their regular program of emerging artists.

February 26, 1972—A thirty-foot tidal wave of toxic black slurry swallowed sixteen West Virginia towns when the Pittson Company’s coal waste impoundment burst open and spilled down the mountainside of Buffalo Creek hollow.

Death is palpable in Ana Mendieta’s work, as a body undergoes elemental transformation. Grave-like pits, gushing blood, and gunpowder silhouettes operate on a symbolic and primordial level, but it’s important to note that some of her earliest work was a direct response to the rape and murder of a nursing student on her college campus in 1973 at University of Iowa.