Ana Mendieta’s practice spanned performance, photography, film, sculpture, and drawing, exploring themes of identity, displacement, and violence. She wrote, “I’m not interested in the formal qualities of my materials, but their emotional and sensual ones.” Mendieta’s work can be both unapologetically direct and introspective. In her Silueta series of photographs, Mendieta’s body serves as both subject and object, simultaneously absent and present. In one photograph, she is immersed in the surrounding landscape and her body is the substrate from which flora grows. In another, the body is absent, intimated by an impression in the earth. Mendieta attributed her desire to connect with the “maternal source,” the earth, to an abrupt relocation in her adolescence from her homeland, Cuba, to the United States.

–Amanda Muhlena, from the Glenstone Field Guide