During her graduate school years at the University of Iowa, Cuban-born Ana Mendieta created a photographic and film series titled “Silueta,” in which she outlined her body’s shape on the ground using a range of natural materials including soil, flowers, blood, fire, and water. For this film, Mendieta dug the shape of her body into a riverbank and filled it with flammable material that she then lit on fire, thereby evoking ideas of nature, religion, the feminine, and ephemerality.