Enduring Tethers: Cecilia Vicuña’s “La Migranta Blue Nipple”
“An object is not an object; it is a witness to a relationship.”
—Cecilia Vicuña [1]
Cecilia Vicuña, La Migranta Blue Nipple (© 2024 Cecilia Vicuña/Artist Rights Society (ARS); photo by Daniel Kukla; courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London)
In the work of Cecilia Vicuña, art is a mode of storytelling, and storytelling a mode of communion. The Chilean-born artist and poet leverages recollection and recombination as acts of defiance, while exploring tradition as a phenomenon not confined to the past, rather as a source of continuity. La Migranta Blue Nipple, a survey of the New York-based artist’s recent work across three floors of Lehmann Maupin’s Chelsea gallery, lends appreciation of the depth and breadth of Vicuña’s practice that incorporates textile, film, mixed-media assemblage, painting, and performance—all pervaded by a simultaneously poetic and political sensibility.
La Migranta Blue Nipple opens onto a row of paintings depicting feminine mythological figures vivified in candy-colored hues. This series, both timely and timeless, recreates a set of the artist’s drawings from 1978 that were either lost or destroyed with minimal documentation. Vicuña harkens to the revolutionary aura of late-1970s Bogotá, where she moved after years of self-exile in London following the 1973 military coup in Santiago that ousted Chilean President Allende. The original pastel drawings emerged after a trans-Amazonian journey toward Rio de Janeiro that exposed her to the spiritual traditions of local Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian peoples. In these paintings created in early 2024, Vicuña reenvisions Orixá goddesses associated with the elemental forces of nature, knitting together Yoruba folklore, Andean cosmologies, and vernacular references from her Chilean upbringing. By channeling her own memories of migration in conjunction with communal recollections far exceeding any individual, Vicuña weaves stories as connective tethers across generations.
With Santa Barbará (1978/2024), Vicuña transposes memories of colorful houses in desert towns dotting the Brazilian Nordeste onto the body of the saint hailed as “mother of the home.” In La música latinoamericana (1978/2024), Vicuña celebrates the cultural hybridity of Latin American music through a figure wielding a tambourine and flute, her torso a guitar. The artist heightens appreciation of the layered narrative underpinnings of these hybridized figures through concise, diaristic written descriptions mounted alongside the paintings.
The presence of each Orixá is resolute within her own composition, yet the side-by-side positioning of the paintings conjures a sort of collective force—a strength-in-numbers potency. The bright pastel hues lend a certain hopefulness emerging from these figures that embody the resilience of indigenous knowledge despite colonial pressures. This resistance dovetails with Vicuña’s understanding that the act of re-creation is political: “If you are a Latin American woman, your work is always dismissed, always destroyed, so to paint them again is a way of saying: we are here, despite the erasure.” [2]
The poetic gesture of reincarnation, emphasized by the slash that cleaves—or collapses—“1978/2024”, exceeds nostalgia, instead thinking beyond the supposed finality of the past, rejecting linear temporal models of capitalist “progress.” Within a display case across from the paintings, ephemera documenting Vicuña’s political activity in late-1970s Bogotá, such as a poster from her solo exhibition in solidarity with Vietnam, renders explicit the artist’s feminist politics: a through line across this aesthetically eclectic exhibition.
Installation view of Cecilia Vicuña, NAUfraga (2022), mixed media, fishnets with 161 hanging objects (83 Precario objects, 40 dried plants/wood, 36 fishnets/yute sac pieces), 19 7/10 x 39 2/5 x 226 2/5 inches (6 x 12 x 69 m) (© 2024 Cecilia Vicuña/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo by Daniel Kukla; courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London)
Vicuña further engages indigenous knowledge systems in NAUFraga (2022), a hanging installation in the adjacent space, marking its debut in the U.S. after its initial display at the 59th Venice Biennale. Vicuña explores the quipu (“knot” in Quechua) as a ritualistic, tactile system of encoding that was widely employed within the Andean South America region before eradication by the Spanish. Despite the monumental scale of the two-story installation, the swaying display maintains intimacy through material remnants hung by delicate fibers, all suspended from, and connected by, a net. This scaled-up quipu integrates Vicuña’s “precarios,” her mixed-media arrangements incorporating neglected or discarded everyday matter—here, debris found in Venice.
NAUFraga is premised on what Vicuña has termed “Arte Precario,” which the exhibition text describes as “the artist’s own autonomous aesthetic system that foregrounds ephemerality, intangibility, and that which disappears.” Upstairs, Prayer for the Rebirth of Peace in All Lands (2024), a newly assembled array of precarios, further reflects Arte Precario as an urgent politicized mode that confronts the imbricated realities of ecological and political precarity. Vicuña continues her precarios as a ritual that began in 1966 with the inaugural gesture of planting a stick in the sand, leaving the transient installation undocumented, wholly to the whim of the tides. These thirty-four mixed-media sculptures installed on one wall incorporate splintered pencils, remnants of yarn, chunks of wood, dwindled erasers, and obsolete electronic cords, each a living encapsulation of unknown histories. By integrating debris one might find in a New York City gutter—or on a forest floor—Vicuña denies distinctions between the organic and the synthetic as supposedly discrete categories.
Installation view of Cecilia Vicuña, Prayer for the Rebirth of Peace in All Lands (2024) (© 2024 Cecilia Vicuña/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo by Daniel Kukla; courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London)
This seemingly discordant yet somehow cohesive array enacts what Vicuña calls a “spatial poem.” The constellated presentation accentuates the rhythmic interplay amongst these delicate constructions tenuously balanced on small wooden pegs. Vicuña evokes the act of collecting—or better put, salvaging—as a mode of care extended toward neglected matter, a political gesture of rehabilitation that denies the conceptual escapism of tossing trash out of sight, out of mind. Just as reworking her drawings suggests artmaking as an open-ended process, her precarios embrace transience in defiance of fantasies of permanence rooted in human exceptionalism.
Continuing her exploration of language as material and material as language, Vicuña presents a handwritten poem alongside the precarios. Beginning with the title, Prayer for the Rebirth of Peace in All Lands, Vicuña calls for solidarity across scales: “we are at war with our selves […] with each other and with the land.” Denying distinctions between violence toward other humans and violence toward the ecosystem, Vicuña foregrounds the political stakes of artmaking as a crucial mode of communion amidst dire, layered precarities. The handwritten scrawl coincides with the scrappy appeal of the precarios, both pushing against tidy, white-cube aesthetics, while inviting viewers to think beyond the gallery walls. Despite the risks of overgeneralization that come with transnational-togetherness rhetoric, Vicuña engages the very premise of coming together as a political proposition. Glimmers of optimism emerge here through recollection and recombination as modes of material and immaterial resilience.
Installation view of Cecilia Vicuña, Prayer for the Rebirth of Peace in All Lands (2024) (© 2024 Cecilia Vicuña/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo by Daniel Kukla; courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London)
La Migranta Blue Nipple at Lehmann Maupin ran until January 11, 2024.
[1] Cecilia Vicuña, About to Happen, 2nd rev. ed. (New Orleans: Siglio Press, 2019), 28.
[2] Pushpin Films, “In the Studio with Cecilia Vicuña,” Lehmann Maupin, 2024, video, 8:35, https://www.lehmannmaupin.com/exhibitions/cecilia-vicuna2/videos.
