ABSTRACT
The Silueta Series, produced from 1973 to 1980 by Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-born artist raised and educated in the United States, comes readily to mind along with the Great Goddess archetype so popular in early feminism. But the artist's shifting allegiance to feminism and the multifaceted interpretations historians have offered of her work have complicated its fit into feminist art history. Sherry Buckberrough suggests that it was no coincidence that the series ended and Mendieta's rejection of “white bourgeois” feminism began with her first trip to Cuba in 1980. In the artist's post-Silueta work, her ongoing abstraction threatens both the presence of “woman” and the tie of the artist to her own goddess images. Buckberrough insists that, regardless, neither “woman” nor the goddess disappear. They return with the viewer's memory of the Silueta Series, done while Mendieta was fully allied with the American feminist movement. The Siluetas are thus fundamental to understanding Ana Mendieta's work and to feminist art history.
