For Cecilia Vicuña, ‘Consciousness Is the Art’ (original) (raw)

Arts|For Cecilia Vicuña, ‘Consciousness Is the Art’

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/arts/cecilia-vicuna-miami.html

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With the planet in peril, the Chilean-born artist is having a new North American moment. Her traveling exhibition has arrived in North Miami.

Cecilia Vicuña at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, where her solo environmental show runs through March.Credit...Angel Valentin for The New York Times

Dec. 3, 2019

Cecilia Vicuña’s current retrospective, “About to Happen,” has been promoted by curators far and wide as the “first major, U.S. solo exhibition by the influential Chilean-born artist.” But that is not completely accurate.

Ms. Vicuña, 71, had a solo show in 1992 at the University of California Art Museum, in Berkeley. She was the subject of another one-person exhibition in 1999 that traveled to top galleries in New York City, Houston and Buffalo. And she headlined yet another exhibition three years later that filled the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Colorado.

But as the sculptor, poet and activist explained, none of those efforts turned out to be as “major” as their presenters had hoped. There were a few positive reviews in the news media, though the public was largely uninterested.

“Nobody came,” she said in an interview last month from her home in TriBeCa. “It was about climate change, and no one was interested in climate change then.”

Things are different this time around, in an age of global panic over the planet’s well-being. “About to Happen” was met with sizable crowds when it debuted at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans in March 2017, generating sufficient enthusiasm to sustain a national tour that has stopped at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle and, in a twist of fate, Berkeley’s university art museum.

The exhibition has now arrived at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, where it is likely to be seen by a slew of curators and collectors attending Art Basel Miami Beach.

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