An “Artist Talk with Cecilia Vicuña” will take place at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, at Vassar College. The artist will be in conversation with our very own Repeating Islands founder and co-editor Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, professor of Caribbean and Latin American literatures and cultures, and Loeb curator Alyx Raz. Free and open to the public, this event takes place on January 29, 2026, at 5:30pm in Taylor Hall, Room 102. As part of the Late Night at the Loeb series, the galleries will be open following the program until 9:00pm, with light refreshments available. The Loeb/Vassar College is located at 124 Raymond Avenue, Poughkeepsie, New York.
Description: Vicuña, a celebrated poet, visual artist, and activist, has transformed art and poetry across decades, creating works that explore human rights, ecology, and interconnectivity. Her innovative “Precarious Art” and monumental quipus invite us to experience the world in new ways. This talk highlights her short film “¿Qué es para usted la poesía? / What is Poetry to You?” featured in “Chronostasia: Select Acquisitions 2020–2025,” currently on view through February 1.
Vicuña will introduce her work, followed by a conversation with curator Alyx Raz and Lisa Paravisini Gebert, professor of Caribbean and Latin American literatures and cultures in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Vassar College.
As part of our Late Night at the Loeb series, the galleries will remain open until 9 pm. This event is FREE and open to all.
The Loeb welcomes poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña, who has been honored with a lifetime achievement award at the Venice Biennale and has had solo exhibitions at the Tate Modern, the Guggenheim, and others. Her visionary work blurs boundaries between text, sound, and art, while addressing urgent topics like human rights and ecological destruction. Vicuña has lived in exile from her native Chile since the country’s military coup in the early 1970s.
Her short film, ¿Qué es para usted la poesía? / What is Poetry to You?, is a highlight of the Loeb’s current exhibition, Chronostasia: Select Acquisitions 2020–2025, which closes February 1.
Following Vicuña’s remarks, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Professor and Chair of Hispanic Studies at Vassar, and Alyx Raz ’16, curator of Chronostatsia, will moderate a conversation and Q&A with the artist.
Cecilia Vicuña (Santiago de Chile, 1948) is a visual artist, poet, filmmaker and activist based in New York. She created the autonomous concept of “Precarious Art” in the mid-1960s in Chile to name what disappears. Her poetic work in space, performance and visual arts is considered a decolonizing vision, that anticipates ecofeminism.
“Arte Precario” stands as a new independent and non-colonized category for her precarious works composed of structures that disappear in the landscape, which include her quipus (knot in Quechua), envisioned as poems in space. She was a co-founder of Artists for Democracy in London in l974. Vicuña has re-invented the ancient Pre-Columbian quipu system of non-writing with knots through ritual acts that weave the urban landscape, rivers and oceans, as well as people, to re-construct a sense of unity and awareness of interconnectivity. These works bridge art and poetry as a way of “hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard.” [. . .]
For full article, see https://www.vassar.edu/news/events/artist-talk-cecilia-vicuna
An “Artist Talk with Cecilia Vicuña” will take place at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, at Vassar College. The artist will be in conversation with our very own Repeating Islands founder and co-editor Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, professor of Caribbean and Latin American literatures and cultures, and Loeb curator Alyx Raz. Free and open to the