Past Exhibitions

Cecilia Vicuña: Lo Precario/The Precarious

Cecilia Vicuna installation

Chilean-born artist Cecilia Vicuña has garnered her reputation through evocative, multidimensional works that span performance, poetry, drawing, and film. Lo Precario/The Precarious features more than 50 of her lyrical, intimately scaled sculptures made from cast-off items—shells, glass, plastic, net, seeds, and stones, to name a few—that are carefully tethered together and balanced. Each precario, and the constellation of them presented here, serves as a “spatial poem” and an allegorical nod to the sociocultural and natural processes that produced, discarded, and degraded these materials.

Since beginning the body of work in the late 1960s, Vicuña has developed her practice of making precarios into a broader conversation about political struggle, the displacement and erasure of indigenous people in a time of increasing globalism, and the alarming, ever more apparent effects of climate change on the natural world. These themes now thread throughout her work in other mediums as well as her sculpture. This exhibition will feature new precarios created with materials found around the Wexner Center and Columbus along with a selection of her artist’s books that have never before been shown in a museum.

"These balancing acts cast shadows that sway."
Cecilia Vicuna installation

Installation view of Cecilia Vicuna: Lo Precario/The Precarious at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Tres elementos (Precarios)

Cecilia Vicuña
Tres elementos (Precarios)
Mixed media
6 7/8 x 5 3/4 x 1/4 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul

Untitled (Precarios)

Cecilia Vicuña
Untitled (Precarios)
Mixed media
7 3/8 x 3 3/4 x 3 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul

Screwdriver del infinito (Preacrios)

Cecilia Vicuña
Screwdriver del infinito (Preacrios)
Mixed media
4 1/2 x 4 1/2 x 3 in.
Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul

Untitled (Precarios)

Cecilia Vicuña
Untitled (Precarios)
Mixed media
10 1/2 x 5 1/2 x 3 1/2 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul

Poncho quipu (Precarios)

Cecilia Vicuña
Poncho quipu (Precarios)
Mixed media
13 x 9 3/4 x 3/8 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul

Cecilia Vicuna installation

Installation view of Cecilia Vicuna: Lo Precario/The Precarious at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Cecilia Vicuna installation

About the Artist

Cecilia Vicuña chevron-down chevron-up

Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948, Santiago, Chile) is the author of more than 20 volumes of art and poetry published in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Her filmography includes documentaries, animation, and visual poems. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (2017); Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago (2014); and The Drawing Center, New York (2002), among other institutions, and was featured in the Hammer Museum’s celebrated Radical Women: Latin American Art 1960–1985 (2018) exhibition as well as in documenta 14 (2017). Vicuña will be the focus of a career retrospective at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, opening in May 2019. The artist has received numerous accolades, including the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (1999), The Andy Warhol Foundation Award (1997), the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation Achievement Award (2018), and a United States Artists Fellowship (2019).

Cecilia Vicuña website

Cecilia Vicuña: Lo Precario/The Precarious is organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts and curated by Senior Curator of Exhibitions Michael Goodson and Assistant Curator Lucy I. Zimmerman.

SUPPORT FOR ARTS ACCESS AT THE WEXNER CENTER
Cardinal Health Foundation
Huntington Bank

GENERAL OPERATING SUPPORT FOR THE WEXNER CENTER
Greater Columbus Arts Council
Ohio Arts Council
The Columbus Foundation
Nationwide Foundation

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Past Exhibitions

Cecilia Vicuña: Lo Precario/The Precarious