If you haven’t checked out the newly opened de la Cruz Collection in Miami’s Design District, do yourself a favor and give them a visit.

Today’s post deals with only a small fragment of the work you’ll find in the 30,000 square foot space. On a third floor, situated in an unassuming section of the collection, is a spot dedicated to Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta that stands almost like a shrine to her memory.

There’s a certain spirituality in the notion that when you die your body goes back into the ground, decomposes and serves to perhaps fertilize and enrich the ground with nutrients, thus promulgating more life on this planet. The cycle of life and death has quite possibly never been dealt with in such an interesting and single-minded of purpose manner as it has in the work of Mendieta, and she expressed this vision literally using every inch of her own physical body.

But when you take into consideration her death, a fall from the 34th floor of a Greenwich Village apartment, the work begins to take on a morbid and prophetic tone. Photographs of the artist’s imprint in the solid ground, sometimes stained red, seem to recall the circumstances of her untimely demise.

The photographic prints that line one particular wall in the de la Cruz Collection seem to be arranged in way that capitalizes on the gruesome manner in whish she died. Nevertheless, the irony of this death and the nature of this work only serves to add yet another layer of depth to the artist’s oeuvre.

De La Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space: 23 NE 41st St.., Miami; 305-576-6112; delacruzcollection.org