ANA MENDIETA

In 2026, her work is the subject of a major show at Tate Modern.

Early life and Background

Ana Mendieta was born in Havana and left Cuba for the United States as a child in 1961 as part of Operation Pedro Pan, an early dislocation that shaped her sustained engagement with exile, belonging, and cultural memory. Raised in Iowa, she studied at the University of Iowa, where a shift from painting to performance and Intermedia art in the early 1970s led her towards time-based, experimental practices.

During her studies she worked closely with artist and teacher Hans Breder, who encouraged cross-disciplinary approaches and documented many of her first performance pieces. In the 1980s Mendieta divided her time between New York and Rome, after receiving the prestigious Rome Prize in 1983, and began developing more permanent sculptural works while maintaining a focus on landscape and the female figure.

Ana Mendieta Artworks

Ana Mendieta’s artworks brought together performance, photography, film, sculpture, and site-specific installations, often using her own body and its trace in the landscape to address presence, absence, and transformation. Working with earth, water, fire, blood, and vegetation, Mendieta described her practice as a way to “re-establish the bonds that unite [her] to the Universe”, positioning art as both ritual and grounding.

‘Silueta Series’ and earth-body works

Between the early 1970s and 1980 Mendieta produced her seminal Silueta Series, more than 200 ‘earth-body’ works in which she impressed, carved, or burned a female silhouette into the land in Mexico, Iowa, and other locations. These silhouettes—formed from mud, sand, flowers, leaves, gunpowder, or fire—were documented through photography and film, emphasising both the fragility of the human figure and its cyclical merging with the natural world.

Key works associated with the series include Imagen de Yagul (1973), in which the artist’s nude body lies in a shallow rock cavity covered with white flowers, and later pieces such as Ánima, Silueta de Cohetes (Firework Piece) (1976), where her outline is momentarily illuminated by fireworks. These artworks engage with Afro-Cuban and Indigenous spiritual traditions, feminist concerns, and land art, while resisting commodification through their ephemeral nature and reliance on documentation.

Sculpture, Installations, and Later Practice

From the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mendieta extended her earth-body language into sculpture, floor works, and outdoor interventions using carved stone, sand, and soil, sometimes transported from sites such as Cuba, the Nile, and the Red Sea. Works like Figure with Nganga (1984) and related floor sculptures translate the female silhouette into low-relief forms that retain a ritual quality while occupying museum and gallery spaces.

During her time in Rome and New York she continued to experiment with drawing and photography alongside site-specific projects that inscribed female archetypes and cosmological symbols into the environment. Across these bodies of work, Mendieta’s art remained rooted in questions of origin, displacement, gendered violence, and the possibility of spiritual reconnection through the elements.

Upcoming Tate Modern exhibition, London

Tate Modern in London will present a major exhibition dedicated to Ana Mendieta from 9 July 2026 to 10 January 2027, situating her practice at the centre of global contemporary art narratives. The exhibition will bring together iconic earth-body works, newly remastered films, early paintings, and late sculptural pieces—many shown in the United Kingdom for the first time—offering a rare opportunity to experience the breadth of Mendieta’s career in one place.

Extending beyond the museum’s galleries, the show will incorporate outdoor elements that respond to Tate Modern’s riverside setting, reflecting Mendieta’s longstanding engagement with landscape and open-air environments. Positioned alongside parallel presentations of women artists such as Tracey Emin and Frida Kahlo in Tate’s 2026 programme, the exhibition underlines Mendieta’s enduring influence on performance, feminist, and land-based art practices.

Ana Mendieta Exhibitions

Ana Mendieta has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions at major museums and galleries worldwide, and her works are held in more than 120 public collections. Below is a selection of important exhibitions.

Select solo exhibitions

• Ana Mendieta, Tate Modern, London (forthcoming, 9 July 2026 – 10 January 2027)
• Ana Mendieta: Traces, Hayward Gallery, London (2013–2014)
• Ana Mendieta, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (retrospective, 2004)

Select group exhibitions

• Silueta Works in Mexico, ICA Boston, Boston (collection and displays focusing on the Silueta works)
• Collection displays, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
• Collection displays, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Ana Mendieta FAQs

Ocula | 2026