Alejandro Colina's 1951 bronze statue of María Lionza, the Indigenous goddess of the Sorte mountain in Yaracuy, is the most recognisable Venezuelan public sculpture. It shows a powerful nude woman holding a pelvis aloft while riding a tapir — a deliberate fusion of Indigenous, African, and European imagery, sculpted in the heroic socialist-realist scale of the period.
The original — which stood for half a century on a traffic island of the Francisco Fajardo motorway, near the Universidad Central — was cracked and badly weathered by the time it was finally moved to the university campus for conservation in 2004. A bronze replica stands at the original site at the entrance to the Ciudad Universitaria.