Cecilia Vicuña Lecture
Cecilia Vicuña, Cloud-net, 1998, street performance, New York. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by César Paternosto. © 2025 Cecilia Vicuña
Join us for a lecture by artist Cecilia Vicuña followed by an audience Q&A.
Doors open at 5:45 p.m. Free and open to the public. Registration is not required. Explore the Visiting Artists Program homepage for visitor information, recordings of past events, and more.
Cecilia Vicuña (born Santiago de Chile, 1948) is a visual artist, poet, filmmaker, and activist based in New York. She created the autonomous concept of "Precarious Art" in the mid-1960s in Chile to name what disappears. Her poetic work in space, performance, and visual arts is considered a decolonizing vision that anticipates ecofeminism.
“Arte Precario” stands as a new independent and non-colonized category for her precarious works composed of structures that disappear in the landscape, which include her quipus (knot in Quechua), envisioned as poems in space. She was a co-founder of Artists for Democracy in London in 1974. Vicuña has re-invented the ancient Pre-Columbian quipu system of non-writing with knots through ritual acts that weave the urban landscape, rivers, and oceans, as well as people, to re-construct a sense of unity and awareness of interconnectivity. These works bridge art and poetry as a way of, in Vicuña’s words, “hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard.”
In recent years Vicuña has exhibited at the Toronto Biennial; Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Turbine Hall, TATE Modern, London; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; Kunstinstitutt Melly, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico; CA2M, Madrid; and Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia, Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia. Her retrospective Soñar el agua was recently on view at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago de Chile, and Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires and the Pinacoteca, Sao Paulo. Her monumental quipus are currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw and Pérez Art Museum Miami.
In 2019, she was the recipient of the prestigious Premio Velázquez de Artes Plásticas, awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture. She received the Golden Lion Award for her trajectory at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. In 2023, she was elected Honorary Foreign Member of the Academy of Arts and Letters of the United States, and was granted a doctorate Honoris Causa by Universidad de Chile. She was the winner of the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas 2023, one of the most prestigious awards given by her homeland. In 2024, she was awarded the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles’ Inaugural Art and Environment Prize. In 2025, her work was the subject of solo presentations at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
This event will be live captioned by Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) services. The auditorium is wheelchair accessible and hearing assisted devices are available. For additional access requests, visit saic.edu/access.