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 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 1966, for one of her most experimental books, El Diario Estúpido, Vicuña wrote 7,000 words a day, recording her emotions and experiences.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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).

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.

She was interviewed for the 2010 film !Women Art Revolution.

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.

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.

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.