Silueta Series (1973–80) is a body of earth-body works by Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta. Created after her exile from Havana and during her years in Iowa and Mexico, the series stages her own silhouette within landscapes, leaving imprints, hollows, and traces in mud, sand, fire, leaves, and stone.
Mendieta pressed her body into the earth, or carved its outline, sometimes filling it with flowers, sometimes burning it, sometimes letting it erode back into soil. The gestures were brief and ephemeral. What remains are photographs and films that document a presence already vanished.
The themes of Silueta Series are displacement, belonging, and the longing for rootedness. The female body is both vulnerable and elemental, a marker of absence and of return. By fusing figure and landscape, Mendieta created a ritual language for exile, ancestry, and loss.
Images from The Estate of Ana Mendieta, Smith College Museum of Art, Artsy, The Guggenheim, and Whitney Museum of American Art.
