MOCA presents Cecilia Vicuña and Alice Rahon exhibitions

Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, curated by Andrea Andersson and Julia Bryan-Wilson

Alice Rahon: Poetic Invocations, curated by Teresa Arcq

November 26, 2019 – March 29, 2020

The first major US solo exhibition of the influential Chilean-born artist, Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen presents performance, sculpture, drawing, video, text, and site-specific installation from the artist’s practice since the late 1960s. The work on view reframes dematerialization as more than a formal consequence of 1960s conceptualism, as it is commonly understood, but as a formal consequence of radical climate change as well—and in both cases—as a process that shapes public memory and responsibility. Working within the overlapping discourses of conceptual art, land art, poetry, and feminist art practices, Vicuña has long refused categorical distinctions, operating fluidly between concept and craft, text and textile. The exhibition features a large selection of Vicuña’s precario sculptures produced over the last four decades that feature found objects in lyrical juxtaposition, as well as a monumental structure created out of collectively scavenged materials from the ever-diminishing Louisiana coast. Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen traces the artist’s long practice to stage a conversation about discarded and displaced materials, people, and landscapes in a time of global climate change.

The Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (MOCA) is also proud to present a new exhibition featuring works of French-Mexican surrealist painter Alice Rahon (1904–1987). “Poetic Invocations” is guest curated by Mexico-City based art historian Tere Arcq. The exhibition aims to contribute to the scholarship and recognition of under-explored women artists, and to the intercultural influences on European artists in exile in the Americas, whose work was often deeply marked by indigenous and archaic cultures. “Poetic Invocations” marks the first solo show dedicated to Rahon’s work in the United States in 55 years since her exhibition at the Louisiana Gallery in Houston, Texas in 1964. The exhibition examines a robust art-historical moment that emerged in 1940 as an international community of artists fled World War II in Europe and settled in Mexico. It will feature approximately 30 works including paintings, works on paper, assemblages, as well as archival material such as the Dyn journal, original poems and manuscripts and photographs to put an emphasis on Rahon´s oeuvre as a whole. The exhibition will explore five fundamental themes: art as poetic invocation, the power of the immemorial past, the journal that challenged limits, the volcano and the Mexican landscape and light: the dilution of inside and outside, and the metaphorical experience of the inside out: fiestas and popular art in Mexico.

For more information please visit www.mocanomi.org