MOCA's The Dream of Water Opens November 15: Vicuña Links a Chilean Salt Flat and Los Angeles Through Quipu
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) opens Cecilia Vicuña: The Dream of Water: Quipu of Encounters Maricunga on November 15, 2026, at MOCA Grand Avenue, 250 South Grand Avenue in Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California, running through June 6, 2027. Vicuña is one of two inaugural recipients of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize; the exhibition is presented alongside Julian Charrière: Deep End, the other recipient's first solo museum show in Los Angeles.
At the core of the exhibition is the Salar de Maricunga, salt flats in the high Andes of Chile's Atacama Desert. The museum said these ancient salt flats and lagoons, part of the ancestral territory of the Colla people, sustain extraordinary microbial communities and ecosystems increasingly threatened by corporate lithium mining and its heavy demands on scarce water. Suspended in MOCA's tallest gallery, Parina Quipu (2026) is a textile sculpture of unspun wool, sheared by artisans in southern Chile and naturally dyed to evoke the Maricunga landscape and the Andean flamingos whose nesting grounds are threatened. The adjacent gallery holds a five-channel video installation assembled from the artist's journeys to Maricunga in December 2025 and May 2026, with a sound piece by Cosmo Sheldrake weaving field recordings, underwater sounds and cosmic radio waves.
Born in 1948, Vicuña is a poet, artist and activist whose paintings, performances, installations, sculptures, drawings, films and poetry have addressed our precarious relationship with the environment for more than five decades, reinterpreting the Incan quipu system of knotted threads as a way of connecting places and people. On opening day, November 15, she gives a poetry performance with translator Rosa Alcalá at 1 p.m. and a conversation with Elizabeth DeLoughrey at 3 p.m. In spring 2027 she will convene a quipu of encounters at MOCA with water defenders from across the Los Angeles basin. The exhibition is organized by Senior Curator José Luis Blondet. General admission to MOCA is free. (Source: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles)
Source: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：洛杉矶当代艺术博物馆（MOCA）Grand Avenue馆舍外观（Wikimedia Commons，CC BY-SA 3.0）
