Sunday, November 15, 2026 at 12:00 AM to Sunday, June 6, 2027 at 11:59 PM
MOCA Grand Avenue, Los Angeles
Poet, artist, and activist Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948, Santiago, Chile; lives and works in New York and Santiago, Chile) is one of two inaugural recipients of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize. Over more than five decades, her paintings, performances, installations, sculptures, drawings, films, and poetry have focused on our precarious relationship with the environment. Often reimagining ancestral forms of Andean knowledge, Vicuña addresses the pervasive effects of colonial violence to create spaces of gathering and reflection. In her quipus, she reinterprets the Incan system of colored, spun, and plied threads, traditionally used for recordkeeping and communication throughout the Inca Empire, as a means of connecting urban spaces, rivers, oceans, temporalities, and people. Rather than focusing on the quipu’s archaeological dimensions, she explores its boundless metaphorical potential. The Dream of Water: Quipu of Encounters Maricunga is the latest in Vicuña’s series of collective actions developed with the participation of communities and publics in both museums and natural sites since the 1960s. The ecological crisis unfolding in the Salar de Maricunga, salt flats located in the southernmost part of the Atacama Desert in the high Andes is at the core of this exhibition. These ancient salt flats and lagoons, which form part of the ancestral territory of the Colla people, sustain extraordinary microbial communities and ecosystems that are increasingly threatened by corporate lithium mining and its heavy demands on the region’s scarce water resources. Suspended in MOCA’s tallest gallery, Parina Quipu (2026) is a textile sculpture made of unspun wool, sheared by artisans in southern Chile and naturally dyed in shades to evoke the landscape of Maricunga and the parinas, or Andean flamingos, whose nesting grounds are also being threatened. The adjacent gallery features Salar de Maricunga Quipu de Encuentro (2026), a five-channel video installation assembled from footage recorded during the artist’s journeys to Maricunga in December 2025 and May 2026. Moving from dusk to dawn across the Atacama landscape, the nonnarrative videos capture the region’s rich biodiversity while poetically documenting the rituals performed by the artist and her collaborators, including artists, scientists, musicians, filmmakers, activists, and Colla community members. Also playing in the gallery is Cosmo Sheldrake’s Canto de Maricunga (2026), a sound piece especially created for the quipu, weaving together field recordings, underwater sounds, and cosmic radio waves, alongside Vicuña’s chants and participants’ voices.In spring 2027, the artist will convene a “quipu of encounters” at MOCA, bringing together water defenders from across the Los Angeles basin for a collective ritual that connects the struggles for water and cultural preservation in Maricunga, Los Angeles and elsewhere. The Dream of Water: Quipu of Encounters Maricunga is organized by José Luis Blondet, Senior Curator, with Ariana Rizo, Curatorial Assistant, in collaboration with Kelsey Shell, Environmental & Sustainability Strategist, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. This exhibition is accompanied by a publication. The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize is a juried award supporting artists whose practices engage critical intersections of art, architecture, design, climate, conservation, sustainability, and environmental justice.