Cecilia Vicuna

Beautifully designed, with a special reverence for her humanitarian heart, Dreaming Water is the most thorough monograph dedicated to the work of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña to date. Vicuña coined the term “Arte Precario” in the mid-1960s as a new category for her works composed of debris and structures that disappear in the landscape, and which also include her quipus (“knot” in Quechua), envisioned as poems in space. Dreaming Water brings together over 200 works—including paintings, drawings, screenprints, collages, textiles, videos, photographs, installations, poetry, artist books and performances—created throughout the artist’s remarkable career. It also features several stimulating texts—a lengthy epistolary piece by curator and editor Miguel A. López as well as new essays by anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli, curator Catherine de Zegher and art historian José de Nordenflycht. Vicuña herself contributes two texts, reflecting on her drawings from the “Palabrarmas” project and the activism of the group Artists for Democracy, which she cofounded in 1974. A rousing conversation between Vicuña, anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena and curator Camila Marambio also figures in the book, blending the artist’s voice with those who are experts in fields pertinent to her practice.
Cecilia Vicuña (born 1948) is a poet, artist, activist and filmmaker whose work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world. She was elected a foreign honorary member of the United States Academy of Arts and Letters and also received the Gold Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2022 at the 59th Venice Biennale.

This beautifully designed clothbound book brings together the Palabrarmas series by the Chilean-born artist, poet and activist Cecilia Vicuña (born 1948). Images of these works—each a powerful juxtaposition of color, poetry and politics—appear alongside new essays and historical references chosen with the artist. Palabrarmas, a neologism that translates to "word weapons" or "word arms," imagine new ways of seeing language. Taking the form of collages, silkscreens, drawings, poems, fabric banners, cutouts, mixed-media installations and street actions, Vicuña’s Palabarmas bring together her work in poetry, activism and visual art. Each one unpacks and deconstructs single words to reveal other words hiding within them, allowing new meanings to emerge. The artist began making these visual anagrams while in exile in London and Bogotá after the Pinochet-led coup of 1973 in Chile, and has always seen them as a form of liberation—as a way to "open up minds by opening up words," as she puts it. The Palabarmas have taken on new relevance in today’s political climate, and appeared on the streets during Chile’s 2019 revolution as protest signs. This book presents a range of Palabrarmas in color for the first time, with new essays by Mónica de la Torre, Carla Macchiavello, Cecilia Vicuña and Jeanne Gerrity, and reprinted texts by René Daumal, Robert Randall and Simón Rodríguez.

Since the 1960s, Chilean poet, visual artist and activist Cecilia Vicuña (born 1948) has brought a radical perspective to the relationship between art and politics through her writing and artistic creations. Vicuña’s work is varied and multidisciplinary, constructed through words, images, environments and a combination of languages, mediums and techniques.

This volume gathers texts by the curator Miguel A. López, Lucy R. Lippard, Valerie Fraser and Cecilia Vicuña herself, along with a selection of photographs and representative pieces, some published here for the first time. This selection shows Vicuña’s constant commitment to themes of eroticism, colonial legacies, liberation struggles, feminism, collective joy, indigenous thought and environmental destruction.

Beginning and ending at the edge of the ocean at the sacred mouth of the Aconcagua River, About to Happen serves as a lament as well as love letter to the sea. In this artist's book, Chilean-born artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña weaves personal and ancestral memory while summoning the collective power to confront the economic disparities and environmental crises of the 21st century.

Collecting the detritus that washes up on shore, Vicuña assembles out of the refuse tiny precarios and basuritas—little sculptures held together with nothing more than string and wire, which she sometimes makes as offerings to be reclaimed by the sea.

About to Happen traces a decades-long practice that has refused categorical distinctions and thrived within the confluences of conceptual art, land art, feminist art, performance and poetry. Vicuña's nuanced visual poetics—operating fluidly between concept and craft, text and textile—transforms the discarded into the elemental, paying acute attention to the displaced, the marginalized and the forgotten.

This is the first overview of artist, poet and activist Cecilia Vicuña's (born 1948) prolific and influential career. Based in New York and Santiago, Vicuña has created a multidisciplinary ouevre inspired by feminist politics and indigenous art practices.

Seehearing the Enlightened Failure reproduces over 120 artworks by Vicuña from the 1960s to the present, ranging from vibrant figurative paintings to text-based drawings and "precarious" sculptures made of biodegradable materials.

It also features documentation of Vicuña's performances and installations, including her acclaimed quipu series in which she drapes large swaths of knotted raw wool from the ceilings of exhibition spaces as an homage to the Inca record-keeping practice.

In this brilliant intergenerational dialogue curator Camila Marambio and Cecilia Vicuña, one of the most intriguing Indoamerican artists of our times, converse about mestizaje/miscenegation, ecological disaster, eroticism and decolonization in their multilingual, subversive and irreverent humorous slang. The result is a unique book that presents a conversation that is both poetic and critical. The particular dialogue presented in the book crosses over from Spanish to English, from poetry to academic argumentation, and from art to science. It proposes a necessary method for decolonial liberation, which reveals the transformative power of art in search of “an ecology of the soul, the resplendence of our connectivity to each other and the cosmos.”

Beginning and ending at the edge of the ocean, Chilean­born artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña's (born 1948) artist's book serves as both a lament and love letter to the sea. Vicuña collects the detritus that washes up on shore and assembles out of the refuse tiny precarios and basuritas—little sculptures held together with nothing more than string and wire.
About to Happen, which accompanies an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, traces a decades-long practice that has refused categorical distinctions and thrived within the confluences of conceptual art, land art, feminist art, performance and poetry. In an era of increasing climate change and economic disparity, Vicuña’s nuanced visual poetics—operating fluidly between concept and craft, text and textile—transforms the discarded into the elemental, paying acute attention to the displaced, the marginalized and the forgotten.