Untitled, from the Silueta series

Ana Mendieta was a seminal figure of 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 inflected by femininity and personal identity, which was greatly informed by her painful experience of exile from Cuba at the age of twelve. The acquisition of this photograph, of an earth carving executed at Montaña de San Felipe in Mexico, is of particular significance in light of Cornell’s history-making Earth Art show of 1969. While her work fused aspects of land art, conceptual, process, and performance art, Mendieta, by embracing the aims of feminism, 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 (both represented in the Johnson’s collection with performative videos), as extremely influential to their work. These younger artists credit Mendieta for dealing with gender- and identity related topics, while struggling to grasp the points of correspondences and differences between individual, nation, and culture.

(Andrea Inselmann, A Handbook of the Collections, 2018)