Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, filmmaker and activist. Her work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world including ecological destruction, human rights and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the early 1970s, after the military coup against elected president Salvador Allende. Vicuña’s work began in the mid 60s in Chile, as a way of “hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard”;. Her art has been exhibited at The Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Santiago; The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) London; The Whitechapel Art Gallery in London; The Berkeley Art Museum; The Whitney Museum of American Art; and MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was included in Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, Germany, 2017. Her itinerant exhibition Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, opened at the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans in March 2017 and will travel to various museums in the U.S during 2018. Vicuña has published twenty-five art and poetry books, including About to Happen, 2017, Read Thread, The Story of the Red Thread, 2017, and Kuntur Ko, 2015.

Living Writers Series Winter 2018:
Performing Women: Race, Art, and Space

Performing Women: Race, Art and Space features four contemporary writers/artists whose writing and art moves between multiple modes: poetry, prose, visual and textile arts, photography, film, dance, and improvisation to address questions of gender, sexuality, and race.  This series will explore the intersections of literature, writing and performance, and the ways that themes of nation, exile, trauma, and joy move through individual, collective and individual artistic practices.
This series will also feature three “Live Models,” in the form of master conversations/performances, mainly for the Creative/Critical (and other) graduate students, faculty, and the larger Cowell College Community.

Winter 2018 Schedule:
January 25th: Jennifer Tamayo
February 1st: Karen Tei Yamashita
February 15th: Duriel E. Harris
February 22nd: Cecilia Vicuña
March 15th: UCSC Creative Writing Program, Undergraduate Student Reading

This event is co-sponsored by the Porter College George Hitchcock Poetry Endowment, Laurie Sain Creative Writing Endowment, the Chicano Latino Research Center, Cowell College, Bay Tree Bookstore, the Siegfried B. and Elisabeth M. Puknat Literary Series Endowment, and Literature Department and Creative Writing Program.