Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, the first major United States solo exhibition of the influential Chilean-born artist, traces Vicuña’s career-long commitment to exploring discarded and displaced materials, peoples, and landscapes in a time of global climate change.
Working within the overlapping discourses of conceptual art, land art, poetry, and feminist art practices, Vicuña (Chile, born 1948) has long refused categorical distinctions, operating fluidly between concept and craft, text and textile. The exhibition includes sculpture, installation, drawing, video, and text-based work from Vicuña’s practice since the late 1960s, weaving together the artist’s many artistic disciplines as well as communities with shared relationships to the land and sea. 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.
Vicuña’s work has been performed and exhibited inter/nationally as part of documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany, at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Santiago, The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and The Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, and The Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others. The author of 22 books, her poetry has been translated into several languages. Vicuña has lived between her native country of Chile and the United States since 1980.
View more information on the Henry Art Gallery’s website.