Wattis Institute launches year-long research season dedicated to the work of Cecilia Vicuña
The Wattis will devote an entire year to reflecting on the questions posed by Vicuña’s work through intimate public and private reading groups and a series of to-be-announced public events
Cecilia Vicuña, Quipu Gut, 2017. Site-specific installation, documenta 14, Kassel, Germany. Photo by Daniela Aravena, courtesy of the artist.
This September, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts embarks on a year-long research season dedicated to the work of Chilean artist, poet, and filmmaker Cecilia Vicuña. The research season, Cecilia Vicuña is on our mind, runs from September 2020 through August 2021. The Wattis will use Vicuña’s work as a point of departure—opening up various questions and themes connecting other artists and ideas to Vicuña’s work—for a series of public reading groups, lectures, performances, screenings, and other events featuring prominent artists and thinkers.
Running alongside but separate from the Wattis Institute’s exhibition programming, each of the Wattis’ year-long research “seasons” creates a community around a broad set of themes and subjects as they relate to the work of a single artist. Cecilia Vicuña is on our mind is Wattis Institute’s seventh research season; past seasons featured Joan Jonas (2014–2015), Andrea Fraser (2015–2016), David Hammons (2016–2017), Seth Price (2017–2018), Dodie Bellamy (2018–2019), and Trinh T. Minh-ha (2019–2020).
Cecilia Vicuña, Skyscraper Quipu, 2006. Mixed media, New York. Courtesy of the artist.
Through the lens of Vicuña, whose work grapples with themes related to the turmoil (and glimmers of hope) of our present moment, the Wattis will ask questions through research, events, and programs over the next year, including: What role does art play in revolution? Can art make a difference? How can we use art as a tool to better understand the world and ourselves? Is art ever enough? Themes that arise in Vicuña’s work that the Wattis will explore include collective memory, ecofeminism, colonialism, language, dissolution, extinction, exile, dematerialization, regeneration, and environmental responsibility.
The research season opens on September 28 with the first of four monthly, small-scale public reading groups (September 28, October 19, November 23, and December 14). A series of public events connected to Cecilia Vicuña is on our mind will be announced at a later date.
At the culmination of this year’s research season, the Wattis will release two publications: a book conceived with Vicuña and the third issue of the Wattis’ new annual reader, A Series of Open Questions.
Cecilia Vicuña is on our mind is co-curated by Jeanne Gerrity and Anthony Huberman and is supported by an Innovation Grant from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation.
Cecilia Vicuña is on our mind: Public reading groups
Cecilia Vicuña is on our mind opens with a series of small-scale public reading groups—September 28, October 19, November 23, and December 14—opening up a virtual space for in-depth conversation around Vicuña’s work. Each meeting is led by a different invited guest who assigns a selection of readings and leads an open dialogue with participants.
Space in each reading group is limited. To reserve a spot in the reading group and receive PDFs of the texts, visit wattis.org.
- September 28: Artist and Wattis Curatorial Fellow Jenni Crain hosts a reading group titled Whose footsteps are these? Where have they gone?. This first conversation will consider cycles, courses, and constructions of time as forms of measure and mark making; of control and erasure; as threads of continuity coalescing bodies, beliefs, landscapes—sharing, pollinating, living, an amalgamation, the life force.
- October 19: Art historian Mia Liu hosts a reading group titled What is permanence anyway?, which considers the theme of transience in Vicuña’s precarios and quipus.
- November 23: Artist Ricki Dwyer asks Can our materials be our witness? and leads a discussion reflecting on the ways Vicuña uses materials as a record of her engagement with “the life force.”
- December 14: Writer and curator Brian Karl hosts a reading group titled What are the “red threads” that help make new rituals make sense?, which explores some of the unpredictable intimacies generated by Vicuña’s interactive performances, as well as by the near-field focus of her videos.
Cecilia Vicuña. Photo by Jason Schmidt.
About Cecilia Vicuña
Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948, Santiago, Chile) is an artist, poet, and activist currently based between New York and Santiago. Since the 1960s, the artist has contributed a radical perspective on the relationship between art and politics through her writing and art practice. Feminist and sociological methods, as well as Indigenous culture and natural materials, imbue her work.
Vicuña’s body of work spans many disciplines, including performance, painting, and installation, but she is perhaps best known for her enveloping skeins of soft wool (quipus) and fragile, temporary sculptures (precarios). Quipus refer to an intricate system of knotted cords used by pre-Columbian Andean cultures for accounting and record keeping in the absence of a written alphabet. This concept has motivated much of Vicuña’s fiber-based art since the mid-1960s, and her quipus evoke Indigenous knowledge systems severed by colonial regimes. Precarios are small, found object sculptures composed of organic materials and plastic debris, and they are often punctuated by moments of bright color. Like her poems, they conjoin insignificant objects in unexpected and revelatory juxtapositions.
Vicuña moved to London and Bogota before settling in New York after Augusto Pinochet’s CIA-backed military coup overthrew Salvador Allende, Latin America’s first democratically elected Socialist leader, in 1973. She now divides her time between Chile and New York.
Vicuña has shown at major museums around the world, including the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Santiago; the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) London; Art in General in NYC; the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; MoMA New York; and the Witte de With, Rotterdam.
She has published 22 art and poetry books, including Kuntur Ko (Tornsound, 2015), Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), Instan (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), and Cloud Net (Art in General, 2000). She was appointed the Messenger Lecturer 2015 at Cornell University, an honor bestowed on authors who contribute to the “evolution of civilization for the special purpose of raising the moral standard of our political, business, and social life.”