Cecilia Vicuña

Cecilia Vicuña (Chile) is a celebrated poet, artist, and activist born in Santiago in 1948. Active since the mid-1960s, her revolutionary vision and genre-bending work in the fields of visual, performance, and literary arts remains at the vanguard of contemporary practice, and anticipated important artistic and academic movements, including Conceptual art and eco-feminism. Vicuña’s oeuvre addresses pressing concerns, including human rights, ecological destruction, and cultural homogenization. She received an MFA from the National School of Fine Arts, University of Chile (1971), and continued postgraduate studies at the Slade School of Fine Art (1973). Following the death of Chilean President Salvador Allende during the military coup led by Augusto Pinochet in 1973, Vicuña went into exile in London. In 1975, she moved to Bogotá, Colombia to conduct independent research on the cultural and artistic practice of indigenous peoples in Latin America. Vicuña has published 25+ books of poetry and art and has completed (or been the subject of) 80+ films since 1973. Her site-specific installations, performances, and moving image artworks have been widely exhibited in museums, and galleries internationally, including The Museum of Modern Art, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Whitney Museum of American Art, and Whitechapel Gallery, among others. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including The Andy Warhol Foundation Award (1997), Premio Velázquez de Artes Plásticas prize, and a Herb Alpert Award (2019). She was named a United States Artists Fellow, and was a finalist for the Guggenheim Museum’s Hugo Boss Prize (2019). Vicuña was appointed Messenger Lecturer at Cornell University (2015), and Princeton University Art Museum’s Sarah Lee Elson International Artist in Residence (2018). She founded Tribu No, an artist collective dedicated to the production of poetry, manifestos, and public performance actions in Santiago (1967), and was a founding member of Artists for Democracy in London (1974). Her work is represented by Galeria Patricia Ready and Lehmann Maupin Gallery. She lives and works in Chile and New York.