CECILIA VICUÑA IN NEW YORK – A VISION THAT FOREGROUNDS INTANGIBILITY

The works on display are informed conceptually by the principles of “Arte Precario,” or Precarious Art, the artist’s own autonomous aesthetic system that foregrounds ephemerality, intangibility, and that which disappears. As an artistic corollary to the instability and shakiness that abounds in the world’s political climate, Vicuña’s precariousness allows her to grapple with issues ranging from immigration to environmental destruction. At the same time, her syncretic visual vocabulary prompts speculation on alternative possible futures, or worlds capable of realizing political, feminist, ecological, and conceptual reparation. 

The title of the exhibition, La Migranta Blue Nipple, makes reference to Vicuña’s personal experience with migration and to the brutal treatment of migrant and immigrant communities that she has witnessed. Visitors to the exhibition will first encounter a series of paintings completed this year that recreate, in oil on canvas, drawings Vicuña made in 1978 but which have since been lost or destroyed, existing only in the artist’s memory and in limited photographic documentation. In 1975, after having been in London in self-exile following the violent military coup d'etat in her homeland Santiago de Chile, Vicuña settled in Bogota, Colombia. Two years later, she traveled from Bogota to Rio de Janeiro, across the Amazon, to visit her cousin, where she encountered the sacred world and living rituals of the local Indigenous and mestizo Afro Brazilian peoples. In response to her journey, she made 30 drawings in chalk and pastel on brown wrapping paper. Many of these works contain references to Orixás––deities worshiped in the Yoruba religion which Vicuña learned of during her time crossing the Amazon––combined with popular culture images collected from her dreams, popular songs, common phrases, and other vernacular sources such as common insults used in her native Chile. Her new paintings bring these original drawings of hybrid Orixás back to life in forms that embody mermaids (Iemanjá), Pachamama (Incan earth mother / mother of space & time), Santa Bárbara (mother of the home), La música latinoamericana (goddess of Latin American music), Flora (goddess of fertility), and San Martin de Porres (patron saint of social justice, racial harmony, and mixed-race people), among many others. 

La Migranta Blue Nipple invites reflection and contemplation through Vicuña’s multidimensional practice. The artist’s return to the spiritual universe of the Orixás offers a way to understand and perhaps offer hope for the future. 

La Migranta Blue Nipple. Exhibition by Cecilia Vicuña.

Until January 11, 2025.

Lahmann Maupin. 501 West 24th Street. New York, United States.