Tate Modern is set to open the United Kingdom’s first significant retrospective of Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) in more than ten years, bringing together over 120 works by the Cuban-American multidisciplinary artist from 15 July 2026 to 17 January 2027. The exhibition spans painting, sculpture, film and photography, charting Mendieta’s pioneering practice and the profound personal and political forces that shaped it.
Mendieta remains one of the most distinctive voices to emerge from the American art world of the 1970s and early 1980s. Working across disciplines at a time when the boundaries between sculpture, performance and land art were being vigorously contested, she developed what she called her ‘earth-body’ works — a term she coined herself — in which she outlined or imprinted her own body into the landscape using natural materials including earth, fire, flowers and water. The results were deliberately ephemeral, designed to dissolve back into the environment, and were documented through photographs and film.
Displacement, Identity and the Silueta Series
The biographical context of Mendieta’s life is inseparable from her art. Born in Havana in 1948, she was sent to the United States as a twelve-year-old following the Cuban Revolution, separated from her parents, brother and homeland. That experience of exile and uprooting became the engine of a lifelong artistic investigation into belonging, origin and the body’s relationship to the earth.
Her celebrated Silueta Series (1973–80), which anchors the exhibition, began during a visit to Mexico in 1973. Mendieta burnt, carved and moulded life-size body outlines — siluetas — into landscapes across the Americas and Europe, often at sites connected to ancient cultures or personal memory. ‘To me, the work has existed in different levels,’ she stated. ‘It’s existed in the level of being in nature…and eventually being eroded away.’ The series challenged the conventional understanding of art as a fixed, durable object, and is regarded as a landmark contribution to both feminist art and land art.
Also on show is her film Ochún (1981), depicting a sand-sculpted figure on the shore of Key Biscayne, Florida — a work that symbolically bridges the waters separating the United States and Cuba. Her Esculturas Rupestres (Rupestrian Sculptures, 1981), figures carved directly into Cuban limestone and drawing on Afro-Cuban and indigenous Taíno traditions, represent her physical and spiritual return to her homeland during the 1980s. ‘My work is basically in the tradition of a Neolithic art,’ Mendieta said in 1984. ‘I’m not interested in the formal qualities of my materials, but their emotional and sensual ones.’
Newly Remastered Films and Restaged Installations
A significant feature of the Tate Modern show is the UK premiere of a series of newly remastered films made between 1971 and 1981, which reveal the technical adventurousness of Mendieta’s filmmaking — she scratched and painted directly onto celluloid, treating the medium itself as a material. Among the works screened are Anima, Silueta de Cohetes (Firework Piece, 1976) and Bird Run (1974), in which the artist, covered in feathers, runs across an empty beach. The photographic series Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Variations) (1972) — in which Mendieta distorts her own appearance using cosmetics, wigs and expression — illuminates her early interest in transformation and identity.
The exhibition also traces the shift in Mendieta’s practice following her award of the Prix de Rome fellowship at the American Academy in Italy in 1983. Moving from outdoor environments into the studio, she began producing more permanent sculptures. Tate Modern will display several floor-based works in earth and binder, including Nile Born (1984), and La Jungla (Totem Grove) (1985), a multi-part sculpture of tree trunks onto which she burnt silhouettes using gunpowder. Delicate drawings on leaves and paintings from her ‘Amategram’ series on bark paper complement these later studio works.
Several of Mendieta’s ephemeral sculptures have been restaged especially for the exhibition. Ñañigo Burial (1976) — a silueta formed from black ritual candles — will be lit at regular intervals throughout the run. A recreation of the first earth-body work she made for an indoor gallery setting, assembled from branches, leaves, soil, moss and stones, will bring a forest-like atmosphere into the gallery. Two tree sculptures will also be installed outside the museum on Bankside.
Context and Curatorship
The exhibition is co-curated by Valentine Umansky, Curator of International Art at Tate Modern; Michael Wellen, former Senior Curator of International Art; and Elsa Collinson, Assistant Curator of International Art, and has been organised in collaboration with the Estate of Ana Mendieta. Research has been supported by the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational, which places global artistic exchange at the heart of Tate’s programme.
The last major Mendieta exhibition to be staged in the UK was at the Hayward Gallery on London’s Southbank in 2013. Her work has since been shown at institutions across Europe, Latin America and Australia, reflecting growing international recognition of her influence on subsequent generations of artists working with the body, nature and questions of cultural identity.
The show also illuminates the broader arc of Mendieta’s engagement with artistic communities. Studying on the experimental Intermedia programme at the University of Iowa between 1972 and 1977, she later moved to New York in 1978, becoming a member of A.I.R. Gallery — the first not-for-profit, artist-directed gallery for women in the United States — and immersing herself in the city’s intersecting art and activist scenes.
Tate Modern is open daily from 10.00 to 18.00, with extended hours until 21.00 on Fridays and Saturdays. Tickets are available via the Tate website. Tate Members receive free unlimited entry; those aged 16 to 25 can visit for £5 by joining Tate Collective.
