Ana Mendieta was a seminal figure in the feminist art movement of the 1970s. She is best known for her Silueta series, in which she recorded private rituals of reconnection with the earth by carving, sculpting, immersing, and burning her silhouette into natural settings. Rooted in nature and in the body, Mendieta’s art was influenced by femininity and personal identity, as well as by her painful experience of exile from Cuba at the age of twelve. While her work fused aspects of land art and conceptual, process, and performance art, Mendieta embraced the aims of feminism and quietly subverted the monumental gestures of male land artists by working at a human scale in the landscape.

In recent years, her work has been cited by many younger artists, among them Janine Antoni and Patty Chang, as extremely influential to their work. These younger artists credit Mendieta with dealing with gender- and identity-related topics, while struggling to grasp the points of correspondence and difference between individual, nation, and culture.