Lunch with Cecilia Vicuña, Princeton’s New International Artist-in-Residence

On a sunny Monday afternoon at the Princeton University Art Museum, we piled plates with salad and sandwiches and waited for an artist’s entrance. We made up a smattering of people whose fascination with art blends with all sorts of other interests: astronomy, language, travel. Cecilia Vicuña, the Art Museum’s new International Artist-in-Residence, walked in with a subtly commanding air of quiet wisdom and attention. She had us introduce ourselves and lingered on our responses, somehow weaving all of our disparate backgrounds, experiences, and interests into a picture of the art she has lived and breathed for decades. We got an idea of her unique approach when she mentioned she has worked with astronomers, being of the belief that science and art have much to learn from each other.

Born in Chile, Cecilia Vicuña has lived a life of travel and made her art her mode of activism. Her points of focus as she describes them on her website are the “pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization.” Her paintings combine the personal with the political, the familiar with the abstract, in a vivid color array that brings out elements of both joy and pain acutely. Vicuña is also a poet, but does not believe that “the linguistic medium is the main one”; she is very intentional about using other media. Her art often contains elements of performativity and temporality. For instance, she uses string and ribbon along with natural elements like sticks, shells, and rocks in endless configurations and settings.

Vicuña made it obvious to us what it means to be a traveler, not just a tourist, and how a traveler’s approach, peeling back the surfaces of an area’s communities and histories, can inform an artistic worldview.

Vicuña brought up her Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, which is emblematic of this worldview. It features both Spanish and Portuguese works plus seven indigenous languages. She described it as a different version of Latin American poetry, a version that does not present it as a “colonial reality.” The book went largely overlooked because of its feminist indigenous vision of language; indigenous languages are tonal, and indigenous women were highly influential in inflecting Spanish and Portuguese with indigenous tonality.

The complexity of language and culture as well as the broad array of cultural and artistic media are of special interest to Vicuña, who believes that the “globalization of television has erased many of [the] particularities” of different dialects stratified across classes. She also pointed out that “Western culture only admits a narrow field of values” and that people from other cultures can serve as a “liberating force.”

Vicuña has not always received due recognition for her art and activist message, a fact she recognizes frankly: “I have been completely disregarded for most of my life.” Her mission and determination have never been dependent on fame, however. Working without recognition she describes as a hard but “fantastic” journey. She pondered the dynamics of her invisibility and visibility over the course of her life: “a change in the sensibility of the younger generation” may have precipitated the change in recognition, with young people searching for things “beyond the digital”: things one can touch. She also takes the work of curators very seriously, remarking that it is “thanks to a handful of enlightened young curators . . . that my work is becoming meaningful, and I’m in awe.” To her, “the most horrendous curators are appropriators and exploiters of the artist,” whereas a good one will do “the exact opposite of that: learn from the artist” about the points of connection.

In art and in life, which are perhaps inseparable to her, Vicuña sees always in terms of points of connection: far from a lecture on her accomplishments, our lunch was a discussion during which more than once she jotted down notes in her notebook on concepts and experiences others had brought up, from capoeira to the stars.

Perhaps the project Vicuña emphasized the most was Documenta, a contemporary art exhibition that comes together in five-year intervals. Documenta was originally conceived in order to show post-World War II that Germany still valued art, since Hitler had deemed so much valuable art “degenerate.” Vicuña declared matter-of-factly, “what brought Cecilia back from the dead was Documenta.” She had been “ignored completely by the Chilean art field,” and she recalled that “when it was announced that Cecilia would be the only Chilean artist in Documenta,” everyone’s question was, “who is Cecilia Vicuña?” It is not a question with a simple answer, but rather one well worth taking the time to explore.

Isabel Griffith-Gorgati, '21
Student Tour Guide