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."
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

About the Artist

Program Support

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