The Visiting Artists Program resource guides contain upcoming speakers' biographies, articles, video and audio content, related publications in the Flaxman Library, and additional online resources. These guides may be used in the classroom in preparation for the event, research, or post-lecture discussion.
Cecilia Vicuña: Tuesday, April 7, 6:00–7:30 p.m. CT
The Art Institute of Chicago, Fullerton Hall, 111 S. Michigan Ave.
This event will be live captioned by Communication Access Realtime Translation services.
Join us for a lecture by artist Cecilia Vicuña followed by an audience Q&A.
Cecilia Vicuña (born 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 1974. 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, in Vicuña’s words, “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 Modern, London; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; Kunstinstitutt Melly, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico; CA2M, Madrid; and Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia, 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 Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires and the Pinacoteca, Sao Paulo. Her monumental quipus are currently on view at the Museum of 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 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, she was awarded the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles’ Inaugural Art and Environment Prize. In 2025, her work was the subject of solo presentations at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
Image Credit: Cecilia Vicuña. Photo by Bruno Savelli
‘True Art is Always Political’: Cecilia Vicuña Marries Tradition and Activism
Rachel Connolly | Ocula | December 3, 2025
Inside the Cover Story: Cecilia Vicuña Weaves the Thread of the Earth across Time
Ana Novi | Whitewall | October 31, 2025
Cecilia Vicuña’s Poetry in Space
Clara Apostolatos | Hyperallergic | December 15, 2024
Cecilia Vicuña On Embracing the Beauty of a Universal Order
Elisa Carollo | Observer | December 11, 2024
Cecilia Vicuña’s Saborami: Expanded Facsimile Edition
Henry Broome | BOMB Magazine | March 15, 2024
‘It’s Time to Wake Up’: Artist Cecilia Vicuña on Her Monumental Soft Sculptures and Their Hard Message About Planetary Survival
Hettie Judah | Artnet News | October 11, 2022
Cecilia Vicuña’s Beautiful Turbine Hall Commission at Tate Modern Mourns the Destruction of the World’s Rainforests
Maximiliano Duron | ARTnews | October 11, 2022
Cecilia Vicuña’s Desire Lines*
Carina del Valle Schorske | The New York Times | August 25, 2022
*This is a library resource that requires ARTIC login
Cecilia Vicuña’s Charismatic Vulnerability
Louis Bury | Hyperallergic | August 10, 2022
Who Is Cecilia Vicuña, and Why Is Her Art Now Receiving So Much Attention?
Jacoba Urist | ARTnews | June 29, 2022
The Precarious Art of Cecilia Vicuña*
Holland Cotter | The New York Times | June 9, 2022
*This is a library resource that requires ARTIC login
Cecilia Vicuña [Podcast episode]
Katy Hessel | The Great Women Artists | November 11, 2024 | Please note this podcast does not provide transcripts
Cecilia Vicuña
PQ8098.32.I35 D44 2024
Anthony Huberman, Jeanne Gerrity (Eds.)
Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection
146.65
Cecilia Vicuña
Storage, PQ8098.32.I35 A28 1992
M. Catherine de Zegher (Ed.)
LIBRARY USE ONLY
NX534.Z9 V53 1997
Miguel A. López (Ed.)
eBook (SAIC Login Required), 2020
Miguel A. López (Ed.)
N6669.V477 A4 2024
Cecilia Vicuña
N6669.V52 A4 2017b
Cecilia Vicuña, Dieter Roelstraete, José de Nordenflycht Concha
N6669.V52 A4 2017
Cecilia Vicuña
PQ8098.32.I35 A6 2018
Visiting Artists Program Lecture Recordings from the Archive
SAIC Visiting Artists Program video and audio lecture recordings (1977–present.) Available with SAIC login credentials.
SAIC Digital Collections: Visiting Artists Program
SAIC Visiting Artists Program publicity archive and audio recordings (1977–98).