Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen

The first major US solo exhibition of the influential Chilean-born artist, Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen traces the artist’s career-long commitment to exploring discarded and displaced materials, peoples, and landscapes. The exhibition includes sculpture, installation, drawing, video, and text-based work from Vicuña’s practice since the late 1960s. These works reframe dematerialization as more than a formal consequence of 1960s conceptualism, as it is commonly understood, but as a formal consequence of radical climate change as well—and in both cases—as a process that shapes public memory and responsibility.

Working within the overlapping discourses of conceptual art, land art, poetry, and feminist art practices, Vicuña has long refused categorical distinctions, operating fluidly between concept and craft, text and textile. Her multi-dimensional works begin as an image that becomes a poem, a film, a song, a sculpture, or a collective performance. Her 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. 

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website