The Loeb welcomes poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña, who has been honored with a lifetime achievement award at the Venice Biennale and has had solo exhibitions at the Tate Modern, the Guggenheim, and others. Her visionary work blurs boundaries between text, sound, and art, while addressing urgent topics like human rights and ecological destruction. Vicuña has lived in exile from her native Chile since the country's military coup in the early 1970s. 

Her short film, ¿Qué es para usted la poesía? / What is Poetry to You?, is a highlight of the Loeb's current exhibition, Chronostasia: Select Acquisitions 2020–2025, which closes February 1. 

Free and open to the public.

Artist Biography

Cecilia Vicuña (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 l974. 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 “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, London; Guggenheim Museum, New York; MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York; Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; Kunstinstitutt Melly, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; MUAC, Mexico; CA2M, Madrid; and Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia (MAMU), 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 MALBA, Buenos Aires and the Pinacoteca, Sao Paulo. Her monumental quipus are currently on view at the 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 February 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 was awarded MOCA LA’s Inaugural Art and Environment Prize. In 2025 her work will be the subject of solo presentations at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.