Cecilia Vicuña

Cecilia Vicuña (born 1948) is a Chilean poet and artist based in New York and Santiago, Chile.
Her work is noted for themes of language, memory, dissolution, extinction and exile. Critics also note the relevance of her work to the politics of ecological destruction, cultural homogenization, and economic disparity, particularly the way in which such phenomena disenfranchise the already powerless. Her commitment to feminist forms and methodologies is considered to be a unifying theme across her diverse body of work, among which her fibre art quipus, knotted or unknotted strings, palabrarmas and precarios, made from natural, delicate materials, stand out. Her practice has been specifically linked to the term eco-feminism.
Cecilia Vicuña was distinguished with Premio Velázquez de Artes Plásticas 2019, Spain's most prominent art award and given out by the Spanish Ministry of Culture to an artist based in the country or from the Ibero-American Community of Nations. The jury statement said that she is receiving the award for her "outstanding work as a poet, visual artist and activist" and her "multidimensional art that interacts with the earth, written language, and weaving.". The same year she was an invited guest artists to the physics laboratory CERN.
Cecilia Vicuña was born in Santiago de Chile in 1948 and raised in La Florida, in the Maipo valley. Her great-grandmother and grandfather were sculptors. From 1957 to 1964, she learned English at St Gabriel's English School and made large abstract paintings at her first studio built by her father in their garden. In 1966, she attended architecture school at the University of Chile in Santiago but switched to the fine arts school. In 1967 she founded the "Tribu No" and the Mexican magazine El Corno Emplumado published her first poem. Her first poem was published when she was 18.
She received her MFA from the University of Chile in 1971 and moved to London with a British Council Award in 1972 to attend the Slade School of Fine Art. In 1973 she went into exile in London following the death of President Salvador Allende and the 1973 Chilean coup d'état led by General Augusto Pinochet, she remained in London.
While exiled in London, Vicuña largely focused on political activism, demonstrating in peaceful protests against fascism and human rights violations in Chile and other countries. She is a founding member of Artists for Democracy and organized the Arts Festival for Democracy in Chile at the Royal College of Art in 1974.
In 1975, Vicuña left London and moved to Bogotá, Colombia to conduct independent research into indigenous art and culture. She traveled throughout the country, Venezuela and Brazil. In Bogotá she was invited by Teatro La Candelaria and Corporación Colombiana de Teatro to create stage designs. In 1980, Vicuña moved to New York City and married César Paternosto. In the 80's she exhibited her work at MoMA, the Alternative Museum, and the Center for Inter American Relations in New York. In the 1990s, Vicuña had several solo exhibitions in the United States, such as "Precarious," a solo exhibition at Exit Art, New York (1990); "El Ande Futuro," a solo exhibition at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, California (1992); and "Cloud-Net," a solo travelling exhibition at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, NY (1998), DiverseWorks Artspace, Houston, Texas, and Art in General, New York, NY (1998).
She was interviewed for the 2010 film !Women Art Revolution.
In 2018, Vicuña became the Princeton University Art Museum's 2018 Sarah Lee Elson International Artist-in-Residence. As part of her residency, Vicuña performed with Colombian pianist Ricardo Gallo.
In 2022, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum hosted Vicuña's first solo exhibition in a major New York museum. At the age of 74, Cecilia Vicuña presented Spin Spin Triangulene, an exhibition which showcases a wide array of paintings that span the artists career, site-specific quipu installations and films. Vicuña's commission Brain Forest Quipu for the Turbine Hall building at Tate Modern was unveiled to the public in 2022.
In 2024, the Pérez Art Museum Miami organized the one-person exhibition of her installation Quipu Gut (2017), acquired by the museum in 2019. Quipu Gut is part of Vicuña's quipu body of work that responds to Andean native worldviews and feminist aesthetics in relation to earth work. Commissioned by and exhibited at Documenta 14, Kassel. Quipu Gut expands on Quipu Menstrual (2006) and Quipu Womb (2017).
Cecilia Vicuña Vicuña was the founder of Tribu No and author of the No Manifesto, that created art actions in Santiago de Chile from 1967 to 1972.
In 1979, while living in Bogotá, Vicuña performed El Vaso de Leche (The Glass of Milk) in which she gathered an audience and spilled a glass of white paint to protest the deaths of an estimated 1,920 children due to contaminated milk. The company responsible had mixed fillers like paint into the milk to maximize their profits.
She performs her poetry internationally, frequently in conjunction with exhibitions or art installations, and documents her performances in videos and on the Vicuña audio page at Pennsound, and in the 2012 collection Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuna which includes transcriptions, commentary, and audience commentaries.
Vicuña has written and published twenty two books of her visual art installations and poetry. Her writing has been translated into several languages. These include Saboramí (1973), the first book testimony of the Military Coup in Chile, documenting the death of Salvador Allende, The Precarious/Precario (1983), Cloud Net (2000), Instan (2002) and Spit Temple (2010), a collection of her oral performances. In 1966, for one of her most experimental books, El Diario Estúpido, Vicuña wrote 7,000 words a day, recording her emotions and experiences. In 2009, she co-edited the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry with Ernesto Livon Grosman, an anthology of 500 years of Latin American Poetry, which the Washington Post called "magisterial."
Vicuña has become increasingly recognized for her works featuring raw wool and other fibers, dyed crimson and suspended or draped overhead. Viewers and critics often react to the works as evocative of blood. Vicuña refers to these fiber installations as quipus, referencing the indigenous writing systems suppressed by Spanish colonizing forces. Unlike transportable pre-Columbian quipus, Vicuña's quipus are integrated into the landscape or the gallery in which they appear. Vicuña referred to her first quipu as the "quipu that remembers nothing," it was an empty cord as well as her first precario.
Vicuña creates "precarious works" characterized by her use of materials that are often fragile, worn by the elements and/or biodegradable: a return to the environment. She describes her work as a way of "hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard." In 1966, she began creating sculptural interventions called precarios, combining ritual and assemblage using typically throw-away materials such as yarn, sticks, feathers, leaves, stones and bones. Between June 24, 1973-August 1974, she created over 400 precarios as an act of political resistance in response to General Pinochet's military coup of President Salvador Allende. This series of precarios were called A Journal of Objects for the Chilean Resistance. The 12 books of the journal are now in the collection of the Tate Gallery in London.
Vicuña has an extensive filmography, having created documentaries, video poems and site specific video installations. In 1980 she made the film ¿Qué es para Usted la Poesía/ What is Poetry to you? while in Bogotá, Colombia, the work is now part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. In 2010 her film Kon Kon was released, it follows Vicuña to Con Con Chile where the sea is dying and an ancient tradition is being destroyed. Vicuña has had a long collaboration with American filmmaker Robert Kolodny, with whom she has created dozens of films with. Some of Vicuña and Kolodny's collaborations include La Noche de la Especies, a video animation based on a myriad of drawings and poems by Vicuña, Disappeared Quipu which appeared as the video portion of the show by the same name at the Brooklyn Museum and MFA Boston in 2018 and Death of the Pollinators which tells the story of the death of the Earth's pollinating insects and originally screened as part of Insectageddon at the High Line in New York City.
Vicuña's installations often consist of large wool strands of various colors and textures. In her Cloud-Net installation series, she utilized the wool of the sacred wild Andean vicuña animal (linked to her by name) in large-scale warp and weft weavings incorporated into rural and urban environments. This installation in particular linked Vicuña to the Feminist Art Movement's Pattern and Decoration Movement. In her solo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, she combined the use of these wool installations with projection technology and sound systems to create an immersive and atmospheric experience for museum visitors.
Vicuña made numerous paintings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many of these paintings make reference to 16th-Century indigenous artists who included their own cultural influences within their paintings of angels and saints for the Catholic Church. In Vicuña's paintings, religious icons are replaced by personal, political, and literary figures such as Karl Marx, Lenin, Salvador Allende, Ho Chi Minh, and members of her own family. In 2018, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York acquired the 1972 portrait of Karl Marx from her Heroes of the Revolution series.
Later, in 1981, Vicuña performed Parti si Pasión (Share – Yes – Passion) in New York, where she wrote "Parti si Pasión" in the colors of the American and Chilean flags on the road to the World Trade Center. The name of this work is a dissection of the word "participation." Vicuña calls this deconstruction of language palabrarmas, translating to "armswords." This is a combination of the Spanish word "armas" (arms, weapons) and "palabra" (words).
Museums that have exhibited her work include the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Santiago, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Art in General, the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, Pérez Art Museum Miami, MoMA, Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Fine Art Boston. Her work is also displayed in the Cerrillos National Center for Contemporary Art near where she grew up. Alongside her quipus, paintings, poetry, and films, there is also documentation of the work she has done with activist groups like Chile's La Tribu, Artists for Democracy in London, and the Heresies Collective.
In 2017, her work was included in both the Athens and the Kassel sites of documenta 14. In 2017, the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans originated a traveling exhibition entitled Cecilia Vicuña: About To Happen. This exhibit was both a "lament and love letter to the sea", featuring washed up debris shaped into sculptures. In 2018 the exhibition, "Cecilia Vicuña: Disappeared Quipu," was shown at the Brooklyn Museum (May 18–November 25, 2018) as well as the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (October 20, 2018 – January 21, 2019). Combining large strands of wool to make a gigantic quipu with a four channel video projection, Vicuña explored the experience of being separated from one's own culture and language.
Vicuña is represented by Lehmann Maupin in New York, England & Co. in London, Xavier Hufkens in Brussels and Galeria Patricia Ready in Santiago. In 2018, her exhibition La India Contaminada, her first survey exhibition in New York, was shown at Lehmann Maupin and reviewed in Artforum. In 2019, the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania held the first major solo exhibition of Vicuña's work. Also in 2019 her first retrospective, Seehearing the Enlightened Failure was shown at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Cecilia Vicuña has taught at School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, and is the co-founder of the Oysi School.
In recent years, Cecilia Vicuña has had workshops and seminars at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University; Denver University; the University of Pennsylvania; the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas, at the Universidad de Buenos Aires; the Festival de Poesía de Medellín at SUNY Purchase; Bates College; Cornell University; Ithaca College; the Just Buffalo Literary Program in Buffalo, NY; The Abrons Center at Henry St Settlement, New York; Pratt Institute; CUNY; and the St. Mark's Poetry Project at the Poets House in New York.