Ana Mendieta was a Cuban-American performance artist, video-artist, and sculptor interested in the relationship between the female body and nature. Her works with photographs and video footage of her own body camouflaged in a natural environment, as seen in Untitled (Silueta Series Mexico) (1973–1978), are considered some of her most compelling. Born in Havana, Cuba on November 18, 1948, she immigrated to the United States at the age of 12 to flee the oppressive Castro regime, leaving her parents behind in Cuba. The artist’s nomadic early life had a profound impact on her, and much of her work addressed her desire to return to her homeland. “My exploration through my art of the relationship between myself and nature has been a clear result of my having been torn from my homeland during my adolescence,” she has said of her work. “It is a way of reclaiming my roots and becoming one with nature.” Mendieta went on to receive an MA in painting and an MFA in intermedia from the University of Iowa. Upon receiving her degrees, she moved to New York where she met her husband, Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. Mendieta died on September 8, 1985 in New York at the age of 36 after falling from the 33rd floor of a Greenwich Village building. Andre was the only suspect in her tragic death, however he was later acquitted. In 2005, the exhibition “Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972–85” opened to critical acclaim at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa. Today, her works are on display at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Art Institute of Chicago, and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, among others.