PRINCETON, NJ.- Renowned Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña is the Princeton University Art Museum’s 2018 Sarah Lee Elson, Class of 1984, international artist-in-residence. On April 10, as a part of her residency, Vicuña will perform with Colombian pianist and composer Ricardo Gallo, offering a special opportunity to experience their longstanding multilingual and interdisciplinary collaboration. Vicuña’s residency also highlights a recent acquisition of the artist’s work now on view at the Museum as part of the installation Migration and Material Alchemy.

Born in 1948 in Santiago, Chile, Vicuña is known for her practice that combines poetry, drawing, sculpture, filmmaking, performance and activism. By weaving together cultural traditions indigenous to the Andean region with those that developed with the arrival of the colonial Spanish and others who followed, her art speaks to contemporary social concerns. Since the 1980s, Vicuña has divided her time between New York and Chile.

“No single genre or media can encompass the breadth of Cecilia Vicuña’s richly evocative and lyrical approach to art making that builds on centuries of tradition to create new meanings and interactions,” said James Steward, the Museum’s Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, director. “We look forward to welcoming her to Princeton and to hearing firsthand how she approaches her practice and her views on the precariousness of contemporary life.”

Central to Vicuña’s work is the quipu, which she employs both as a medium of poetry and as a form of sculpture for her ephemeral land-art installations and performances. The quipu – from the Quechua word for “knot” – is a knotted cord device that was used by the Incas for keeping records and sending messages throughout the Inca Empire. In many of the knots, scholars have deciphered a decimal-based system of numbers similar to our own. Approximately one-third of the surviving quipus, however, do not follow this system and may convey words, poetic verses or other narratives not yet understood. For Vicuña, quipus evoke the ways in which language is tied to land, colonialism and problems of translation.

In 2017 the Museum purchased Vicuña’s Chanccani Quipu (2012), a bilingual manuscript of ink on knotted cords of unspun wool and bamboo, which the artist has described as “a metaphor in space; a book/sculpture that condenses the clash of two cultures and worldviews: the Andean oral universe and the Western world of print.” This work – as well as two Inca quipus dating from the 15th to 17th centuries and a 1980 conceptual film by Vicuña in which she asks a diverse cross section of residents of Bogota, Colombia, the work’s titular question, “What is poetry to you?” – is currently on view in the installation Migration and Material Alchemy.