Ana Mendita’s Silueta Series comprises over 200 photographs. These specific works were called Untitled taken in 1976. These are color prints of the original photographs developed in 2001.  They were installed in the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles as a part of the Joan Didion exhibition. 

Ana Mendieta was a Cuban-American artist who combined the mediums of performance art, sculpture, and photography to create a series of site-specific artwork. She used her body in conjunction with the natural environment to create art revolving around themes of femininity, identity, her Cuban heritage, and her experience of living during the Cold War. Growing up during the Cold War era had a profound effect on the artist as she traveled between the capitalist United States and communist Cuba: her homes were each other's, ideological enemies. She was born in 1948 in Cuba but moved to the United States after the Cuban Revolution in 1961 along with thousands of other unaccompanied kids. Mendieta’s art demonstrates influence from the US and Cuba as a way for her to actualize and express her pain and identity. 

In her earlier works, Mendieta explored using her body as a sculpture or inanimate form to create various works of expressionist and performance art. However, it was not until she traveled to Mexico in 1973 that she started her “site-specific body works [that integrated sacred and secular forms' '; inspired because the country’s Latin American culture reminded her of the homeland she had been separated from (Herzberg, 151). Her work continued to develop themes of spirituality in a secularized way by honoring the natural environment. For example, the Sileutas series depicts sculpted-out ground that mimics the outlines of  Mendieta’s body and uses natural elements like earth, fire, water, mud, grass, rocks, and blood among others. Her use of elemental subject matter was “a means of infusing spiritual power or, as she would put it, ‘magic,’ into her art” (Roulette, 21-2). The series of site-specific Siluetas that are exhibited in the Hammer Museum was taken in Mexico (1973-1977). They depict sand that was carved out in the shape of Mendieta’s body on the shoreline so that waves roll over it, and slowly erode the vestige. She placed red pigment in the cavity so that the water would turn it red. Her photographs immortalized the stages of her structure’s decay and were shared in magazines. In this way, the cultural and spiritual impact of her Third World heritage was able to cross into the First World of her displacement, demonstrating the ways art united cultures despite the Cold War’s separate spheres.

As a Cuban exile, Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series came at a point in her life where she had reconnected with her estranged Latin American culture in 1973 Mexico. It was there that she visited pre-Columbian sites, which connected her to indigenous culture before European colonization assimilated itself into much of it. Landscapes and nature became increasingly important in her work and in this  Silueta Series, this manifested as her body literally being one with the sandy shore. Thus, the environment itself is personified and spiritualized much like indigenous peoples’ religion of animism- the belief that all natural phenomena share a singular spirit. She fused her studies of indigenous rituals and religions with contemporary movements of body and performance art. 

Her  Silueta Series’s depiction of her feminine form composed on a beach where waves would consume the body mold until its presence on the surface was indistinguishable from the sand, was meant to show an “omnipresent female force” (Ypsilanti, 70).  These feminist themes are exhibited; since the ocean is often personified as female, one could view this as her body joining the ocean to unite as one ephemeral form, instead of as the ocean erasing her. Her figure is shown with her hands above her head and with her legs together. This could represent her passivity and acceptance of being reclaimed by her environment. Mendieta posed like this to symbolize the connection between land and sea, and to appear as a lost soul.

Her body was both her medium and the picture, alluding to the themes of a complex identity. This is representative of Menditia’s diaspora and conflicts surrounding her gender, heritage, and ethnicity which led to her marginalization and confusion within the cultural backdrops of her time. Her selfhood was contested both by society and an internal search for personal identity. Her body silhouettes emphasize this lack of definable selfhood by creating a sculpture that is liminal and existed in a state of transformation.

Audiences are only able to view the  Silueta Series through the photographs that Mendieta took of them before nature reclaimed its elements. In this 1973 series, even though the original sculptures were shortly erased by the ocean’s oscillations soon after its conception, these photographs outlive it. This is meant to demonstrate humanity's impermanence against forces of nature and the transcendence of lived existence in my opinion. As each silueta would be subsumed by the surrounding environment, the photographs are the only traces. 

The medium of photography in this work makes it easily connected, redistributed, and accessible in a way that is almost ironic to nature’s original intention. This shows humanity’s insistence on immortality and their efforts to create something lasting, even though it will eventually be washed away and outlived by nature. By trying to depict the transcendence of nature and the fleetingness of human intervention, Mendeita ironically contributes to resistance against that force. 

However, it was Mendieta’s intention that her documentation would express “one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to specter, from specter to plant, from plant to galaxy. My works are the irrigation veins of this universal fluid” (Mendieta, 70). This interconnection between the universe and every living thing shows the influence of her spirituality in her artwork as body and ocean become one singular essence. Considering the body was sculpted out of the sand and other natural materials; this may indicate she tried to express how the body was never a separate entity from the environment and universe- it is only people’s perceptions that separated and made these parameters about what is selfhood. Her earthwork can be viewed to represent how humanity is everything, nothing, or some amalgamation of balance.Despite the Siluetas being modeled on Mendieta’s body, these were not self-portraits nor performance art. Silueta in Spanish (Medieta’s native tongue) directly translates to silhouette in English which means the shape or outline of something. This is a reference to the body silhouettes Mendita made on the earth. The series is heavily influenced by her cultural roots, which influenced her appreciation of the environment as part of the medium. Thus, it is logical that she chose to name the series in Spanish rather than English because the United States was where her diaspora from Cuba led her.

An artistic experience is the combination of physical sensations to the actual artwork and the effect that has on somebody's feelings or emotions; and, the metaphysical perceptions and ideas somebody has as they conceptualize their bodily sensations. These sensations are grounded in the physical sensory world of vision, sound, smell, taste, and touch which result in objective feelings surmised from processing the raw sensory data. In order for me to register the sensory data of Mendieta’s series, the absolute threshold for sensation had to be met to stimulate sensory neurons.

Upon encountering the pictures of the Silueta Series, I gave it my selective attention by focusing my conscious awareness on that stimuli. I was focusing on my sense of vision so I was blinking less and lost track of my other surroundings. By honing in on the Silueta Series, I was intentionally blind to the light bulb artwork that was to my left, and the desk from Joan Didion’s home to my right. Before I was able to process the images before me, my eyes had to transduce the visual stimuli into neural impulses in order for my brain to interpret what I saw and then feel as a result of this understanding of the stimuli. This occurred when my eyes’ specialized receptor cells in the retina registered the sensory data of the photographs which they transformed into neural impulses that were then delivered to my brain via the optic nerve. The reason why I was able to have an intense reaction to the Silueta Series while others may have completely disregarded it amongst the works of Andy Warhol or pieces that focused more directly on Joan Didion (the subject of this exhibition), can be attributed to signal detection theory. This theory describes how a stimuli’s strength is not the only factor that influences our detection of it; but, rather our physiological states- are shaped by experiences, alertness, or motivations. I was psychologically primed to find a work of art that I like and felt connected to because I was aware I would have to choose one to write this very research paper about. Thus, somebody who was enjoying the exhibit passively or for a more pure motive may have completely disregarded or not even consciously registered works that did not strongly stimulate them. 

In viewing the Silueta Series, I processed the scene into subdimensions of color, form, depth, and motion which my brain parallelly processed simultaneously. My sense of the empty body cavity that became filled with water as waves passed over it allowed me to visualize the way the form changed throughout the composition. The monotone or bland color pallet in the images contrasted against the movement and degradation of the works. This lack of color and the negative space created by the sand may contribute to feelings of emptiness and a sense of loss (of selfhood). Natural elements like ocean water progressively fill up the negative space, creating a sense of life, expansion, nature, and togetherness. This evoked a feeling that nature is what connects people. Textures created by the natural materials of sand, water, seafoam, pigment, and rocks furthered these feelings of a connection to nature and the environment. This visual contrast between the sileuta’s negative space and their organic shape makes them stand out in the composition with a sense of movement (almost as if they were alive). My retina communicates the visual stimuli to my brain’s visual cortex where neural cells process the information. The sensation of viewing the siluetas invoked a sense of mystery as the abstract forms intrigued my interest in their meaning. 

The interpretation and conceptualization of art are contingent upon a person’s predisposition to how they will define and categorize sensory data. Somebody’s perceptual sets can cause them to see, feel, hear, and experience the same environmental stimuli subjectively because by processing complex stimuli such as art, top-down processing is often used which depends on somebody’s previous knowledge. As peoples’ brains seek to formulate patterns and connections in order to make sense of the world, experiences result in schemas or the categorization of concepts that cause the development of mental tendencies called perceptual sets. 

I had a schema about what the female body looked like so I identified the Silueta Series depiction of a body shape to be one of a woman. The stereotype of gender is an example of a perceptual set that led me to conclude because the figure was more curvaceous, it must have been of a woman. This perception then affected my interpretation of the artwork's complex themes specifically of gender conflicts: I identified the feminine body in relation to my perceptual set that the ocean in mythology is female, to indicate the connection of womanhood to nature. This created a sense of meaning that I attributed to the abstract organic shapes I had sensed in the images. 

The degree to which I registered the complexity of the series can be described by the concept of Pragnanz in Gestalt psychology. The principle of figure and ground or Pragnanz (good figure) is the law of good figure or the law of simplicity. It describes the degree of simplicity in how people create patterns to organize the world based on how they perceive environmental stimuli (in the most simple way). Thus, if certain people do not perceive the world in a simple way, the patterns they look for will be more complex. Their resulting conclusions based on the environmental stimuli will thus conform to those complex patterns of perception because that would be less resistant (and more simple) than redefining perceptual patterns. Thus, this is why people still perceive things in the same environment to varying degrees of importance and complexity. For example, I have a complex understanding of the Cold War across various disciplines because as a freshman, I studied it for a year since it was the topic of Academic Decathlon. In the art section, Mendeita’s Silueta Series was featured. Therefore, when I saw the series in the gallery, I was familiar with it and was able to connect what I was presently seeing to my previous knowledge about the work. My first thematic interpretation of the art was the decay of selfhood as a result of cultural dissociation and the boundaries of universalization. This interpretation confirmed my previous understanding of what Mendieta and other artists during the Cold War era felt. This association of the art to a cultural backdrop was a subjective tendency that made conceptualizing the objective sensory artwork, more simplistic than forming an entirely new association. 

Despite the Silueta Series existing as a group of fragmented photographs, the Gestalt grouping principle of continuity explains why I was able to view the works as a continuously connected pattern. I could recognize that the body sculpture that was not eroded, was the start of the series, which progressively showed images of it more destroyed as the water passed over it; rather than assuming they were separate works of art with no shared meaning. This perceived order and concept of a change over time affected my interpretation of the art. I viewed its meaning to show how humanity is transient while nature is eternal. However, this made me feel optimistic instead of fearful about human mortality because to me it demonstrated how people are an ephemeral manifestation of an expansive universe, rather than separate entities.

By using natural materials in her art, Ana Mendieta explored the relationship between the natural world and the human experience, showcasing the power of nature in shaping peoples’ thoughts, emotions, and experiences. Her  Silueta Series So explored the relationship between the body and the environment. through the use of her own body in creating the structures that unite body and environment as one, Mendieta explores how physical experiences shape perceptions and emotions. She emphasizes this contrast in her artwork by highlighting the contrast and progression of negative space; and how that change can purposefully elicit a range of specific emotions. 

Emotions and motivations influence how people perceive sensations and stimuli. This is greatly impacted by context and people’s expectations. While I was at the museum, I was in a good mood. I was listening to jazz music which made me feel tranquil and confident. Since I was alone, I was able to take my time to observe the art in depth and focus on the sensory experience. I had expected the museum trip to make me feel at peace because it is a pleasurable activity for me. The expectation that I would have an enjoyable experience gave me a perceptual bias as it meant I was more likely to perceive sensations in a way that would confirm my expectation.  this experience allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of the way my brain processes abstractions and personalizes art. Artist myself, it was very impactful for me to understand what specifically it is about an artwork's appearance that enables it to invoke a certain thematic understanding and formulations of personal connections to the viewer.

Works Cited

Herzberg, Julia P. “Ana Mendieta, the Iowa Years: A Critical Study, 1969 through 1977.” Ph.D.

dissertation, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 1998.

Roulette, Laura. “Ana Mendieta as Cultural Connector with Cuba.” American Art 26, no. 2 (2012): 21–27.

1. Ana Mendieta, quoted in Petra Barreras del Rio and John Perrault, Ana Mendieta: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1988), p. 10.

Weininger, Susan S. “Ana Mendieta.” Grove Art Online. doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T056800 . Not paginated.

Ana Mendieta, “A Selection of Statements and Notes,” Sulfur (Ypsilanti, Mich.) no. 22 (1988), p. 70.