Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948 in Santiago, Chile; lives and works in New York and Santiago) integrates practices of poetry, performance, Conceptualism, and textile craft in response to pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago, she was exiled during the early 1970s after the violent military coup against President Salvador Allende. This sense of impermanence, and a desire to preserve and pay tribute to the indigenous history and culture of Chile, have characterized her work throughout her career.
Read MoreWhile living in Chile during the mid-1960s, Vicuña began an ongoing series of small sculptures she calls precarios, spatial poems in which she combines feathers, stone, plastic, wood, wire, shells, cloth, and other human-made detritus. These tiny sculptures are often loosely fastened together with string, so the materials appear to have gathered naturally. These works are defined by their fragility and ephemerality: Vicuña initially composed the precarios along the ocean's edge, so that they would inevitably be erased by the high tide. Around the same time, Vicuña became interested in ancient quipus—an Incan method of visual communication and record-keeping involving the knotting of colored strings. Her first spatial weavings date from the early seventies, and soon after she began to make her own Quipus from unspun wool—ephemeral, site-specific installations which combined the tactile ritual of weaving and spinning with assemblage, poetry, and performance. Vicuña's surreal figurative paintings of the 1970s are more explicitly personal and political than her other bodies of work, and were in direct response to the unrest in Chile and her subsequent exile. These paintings refer to the subtly subversive images made by 16th-century indigenous artists in Latin America after the Spanish conquest, when they were forced to paint angels and saints for the Catholic church. In Vicuña's paintings, religious icons are replaced by personal, political, and literary figures, commemorated and mythologized by the artist.
Vicuña received her MFA from the National School of Fine Arts, University of Chile in 1971 and continued with postgraduate studies at Slade School of Fine Art, University College London from 1972-1973. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA, 2017; Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago, Chile, 2014; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile, 2014; FRAC Lorraine, Metz, France, 2013; Institute for Women and Art, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 2009; The Drawing Center, New York, 2002; and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO, 2002. Group exhibitions and biennials featuring her work include Documenta 14, Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany (2017); Radical Women: Latin American Art 1960-1985, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2017; 18th Sydney Biennale, Australia (2012); DANCE / DRAW, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2011; ONLIN__E, Drawing Through the Twentieth Century, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010; WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2007; BIENNIAL Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1997; and INside the VISIBLE curated by Catherine M. de Zegher, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 1996. Her work is in numerous international private and public collections, including Tate Gallery, London; FRAC Lorraine, Metz, France; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile; UC Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; and the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin, TX.
Vicuña is the author of 20 volumes of art and poetry published in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. Her filmography includes documentaries, animation, and visual poems. Vicuña has received several awards, including The Anonymous Was a Woman Award, New York (1999); and The Andy Warhol Foundation Award (1997), and in 2015 was appointed the messenger lecturer at Cornell University.
The list remains overwhelmingly dominated by people, institutions and movements in the Western world.
Forty-one new works have been commissioned to help develop the theme of 'Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning'.
The six nominees for 2020 were Nairy Baghramian, Kevin Beasley, Deana Lawson, Elias Sime, Cecilia Vicuña, and Adrián Villar Rojas.
Despite numerous cancellations and postponements, several significant biennales in Europe and Asia will take place this year.
Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith: How would you describe the relationship between your art-making, writing and activism? Has it changed over the years? Cecilia Vicuña: It's a relationship that keeps moving while remaining the same. I couldn't think of one without the other and so the limit between them is porous and shifting and leaky. Something in...
IN JUNE, NEW YORK'S MUSEUM OF MODERN ART WENT DARK to put the finishing touches on its contentious five-year expansion, which promised to put $450 million and 47,000 square feet of Diller Scofidio + Renfro architecture toward fostering a 'deeper experience of art' across boundaries of media, geography, and identity. Today, MoMA emerges from its...
You enter Cecilia Vicuña's exhibition at Lehmann Maupin, 'La India Contaminada' (The Contaminated Indigenous Woman), as if stepping into a forest. Many of the 71-year old artist's hallmark, enveloping skeins of soft wool, or quipus, hang in a thicket from the ceiling of the front gallery.
Arriving at Cecilia Vicuña's TriBeCa apartment-cum-studio, I am ushered in through a dramatic drapery of plastic that partially obscures numerous floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, as if I'm entering some secret hideaway. The artist assures me that the plastic is temporary; just the result of some old building facets that needed a facelift. The books...