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Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen
By Suzanne Cohen
In celebration of Miami Art Week 2019, the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (MOCA) is presenting the first major U.S. solo exhibition of influential Chilean-born artist Cecilia Vicuña. Tracing Vicuña’s career-long commitment to exploring discarded and displaced materials, human groups, and landscapes in a time of global climate change.
“Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen” is organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (CAC), and co-curated by Andrea Andersson, The Helis Foundation chief curator of visual arts at the CAC, and Julia Bryan-Wilson, associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The show debuted at CAC in 2017.
Cecilia Vicuña. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul. Photo: Daniela Aravena.
The exhibition assembles the artist’s multidisciplinary work in performance, sculpture, drawing, video, text, and site-specific installations created over 40 years. Reframing dematerialization as both a formal consequence of 1960s conceptualism and radical climate change, the exhibition examines a process that shapes public memory and responsibility. Operating fluidly between concept and craft, text and textile, Vicuña’s practice merges dissimilar disciplines and communities with shared relationships to land and sea, and to the economic and environmental disparities of the 21st century.
Cecilia Vicuña, Precarios, 1966-2017. Up to 130* found-object sculptures: stone, shells, glass, wood, plastic, thread, debris Presented in field of sand and along the wall on small shelves made of wood. “Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen,” installation view. Courtesy of Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, 2017. Photo: Alex Marks.
Vicuña’s work reflects the overlapping dialogs of conceptual art, land art, poetry, and feminist art practices. For the first time in this traveling exhibition, the show includes painting, a practice that Vicuña began during the 1970s and to which she has recently returned-in some cases, repainting lost paintings from memory.
Cecilia Vicuña, La Noche de la Especies, 2009, Looping animation installation. Animation by Robert Kolodny. “Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen,” installation view. Courtesy of Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, 2017. Photo: Alex Marks.
An expansive presentation of Vicuña’s ‘precario’ sculptures, which the artist began creating in 1966, is included in this show. Vicuña assembles these precarious works from fragments of wood, thread, and other found objects into temporary small sculptures that despite their modest scale have a surprising dynamism and energy. The exhibition features the installation Burnt Quipu (2018), in which lengths of dyed wool hang floor to ceiling, connecting earth and sky, in mourning for the forest fires around the world. Burnt Quipu is part of Vicuña’s longstanding artistic exploration of the ancient Andean writing tradition of record keeping with knots, an advanced communication system dismantled by the European colonizers.
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Cecilia Vicuña, Burnt Quipus, 2018, site-specific wool installation, approximately 23 ½” x 14” x 8.” UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), installation view.
Born in Santiago de Chile, Vicuña is a poet, visual artist, and filmmaker. She is the author of more than 25 books of poetry. Her multidimensional works begin as an image that becomes a poem, a film, a song, a sculpture, or a collective performance.
Cecilia Vicuña, Semiya (Seed Song), 2015, 7 minutes, 45 seconds. “Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen,” installation view. Courtesy of Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, 2017. Photo: Alex Marks
Vicuña’s work is included in the collections of The Tate Gallery, London; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Chile, Santiago, Chile; MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She lives in New York City, where she co-founded oysi.org, a site for the oral cultures and poetries of the world. Vicuña’s work is represented by Lehmann Maupin (New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul). Vicuña’s art has also been featured in Documenta 14 and was recently exhibited in a retrospective at the Witte de With in Rotterdam, which closed on November 24, 2019.
Cecilia Vicuña, Balsa Snake Raft to Escape the Flood, 2017, debris, bamboo, willows, twigs, fishing line, beads, rope, net, styrofoam, plastic, and feathers, 42’ x 6’ x 11’. “Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen,” installation view. Courtesy of Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, 2017. Photo: Alex Marks.
“Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen” will be on view at MOCA North Miami through March 29, 2020. The museum is located at 770 NE 125th Street, North Miami, FL 33161 | www.mocanomi.org.
Suzanne Cohen is an arts writer based in Orlando, Fla.
