Ana Mendieta

At the University of Iowa she completed three degrees in art under Hans Breder and encountered the land art and ritual workshops of Mary Beth Edelson, which gave form to what would become the Silueta series. Between 1973^[1] and 1980 she made approximately two hundred earth and body works, tracing her silhouette in the landscape through fire, flowers, mud, and smoke. The earliest, Flowers on Body (1973), was executed at El Yagul, an archaeological site in Oaxaca, Mexico, where she lay in a womb-like cavity in the earth and covered herself with white blooms.

The Siluetas resist easy categorisation. They operate where feminist art, Afro-Caribbean spiritual practice (particularly Santeria), land art, and body performance converge. She was in direct contact with the critic Lucy Lippard, who shaped much of the early feminist reading of the work, and the critical debate centred on whether Mendieta's identification of the female body with the earth affirmed feminine specificity or dissolved individual identity into an essentialist archetype.

She moved to New York in 1978^[1], joined the AIR Gallery (a feminist collective), and won the Rome Prize in 1983. She died in September 1985^[1] following a dispute with her husband, the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, who was tried for homicide and acquitted. She was thirty-six.