Past Exhibitions

Cecilia Vicuña: Lo Precario/The Precarious

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Jun 01, 2019–Aug 18, 2019

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ADMISSION
Free for members, college students (with valid ID), patrons under 18, active military and veterans
$8 general public
$6 senior citizens (65 and older)
$6 Ohio State faculty and staff (with BuckID)

All visitors are admitted to the exhibition for free on Thursdays after 4 PM and on the first Sunday of each month; admission is also free with a ticket to any same-day Wexner Center event. The exhibition is closed on Mondays.

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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."

HYPERALLERGIC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the Artist

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

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Exhibitions

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
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Ohio Arts Council
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