The intimate and the vast: a conversation with Cecilia Vicuña and Teresita Fernández

Though Cecilia Vicuña and Teresita Fernández share a city (New York), a gallery (Lehmann Maupin) and many sensibilities, they didn’t know each other personally until Art Basel sent Laura van Straaten to sit down for a conversation with them to discuss each artist’s solo Miami museum exhibition, the commonalities in their work, their mutual preoccupation with the politics of landscape and the climate crisis.

Three thousand miles from where smoke rose and fine particles of charcoal swirled softly to the forest floor of the Amazon, two artists who share a deep interest in the intersection of landscape and the legacies of colonialism greeted each other with anticipation. Those more than 100,000 abnormally intense blazes in the rainforest became a touchstone and a figurative allegory for Cecilia Vicuña and Teresita Fernández, whom Art Basel Magazine brought together to talk at length for the first time on the occasion of their two important museum exhibitions on view now in Miami.

As Vicuña put it, there is a ‘deep connection’ between the two women, working as they do ‘with similar concerns, similar sensibilities, similar processes of the imagination.’

First, some important distinctions. Based in New York since the 1990s, Fernández was born in 1968 in Miami to Cuban parents. A full generation ahead of her, Vicuña was born in 1948 in Chile and lived in exile after the 1973 Chilean coup d’état, first in London, then in Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil before making New York her home in the 1980s. 

Fernández’s exhibition at Pérez Art Museum Miami is a retrospective, with more than 50 of the artist’s large-scale sculptures, wall works, installations, drawings and mixed media from the 1990s to the present. The title, ‘Teresita Fernández: Elemental,’ nods to her long use of natural materials like charcoal, graphite and malachite, featured here. 

The show is the first collaboration between PAMM and the Phoenix Art Museum, where the exhibition will travel from March 21 to May 24, 2020, before moving on to the New Orleans Museum of Art from June 26 to September 13, 2020. Included is recent work in which Fernández addresses the current sociopolitical moment of the U.S. as connected to land, place, and climate. 

Meanwhile, ‘Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen’ opens December 2 at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (MOCA). It’s the first major U.S. solo exhibition for the artist and highlights her long commitment to exploring discarded and displaced materials, peoples and landscapes. Showcasing Vicuña’s sculptures, drawing, performances, video, installations and writing created over 40 years, the survey was co-organized by New Orleans’ Contemporary Arts Center and the University of California’s Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and had stops at both before arriving in Miami, as well as at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art and the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery in Seattle.

But ‘About to Happen’ is by no means old hat; for exhibitions, Vicuña often remakes work anew, sometimes repurposing materials or combining them in new ways. And for Miami, the artist has created new paintings, a medium that was a corner­stone of her practice in the 1960s and to which she has very recently returned. 

The two artists met on a drizzly day in Brooklyn, first at Vicuña’s one-room studio in Sunset Park and then at Fernández’s newly renovated multilevel studio in Boerum Hill. They were soon explicating each other’s artwork, embracing and whispering like fast friends.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Laura van Straaten: You haven’t really talked at length before today, but you know each other’s work. What connections have you already drawn?

Teresita Fernández: I lament not knowing of Cecilia’s work as a young art student, and that’s often the case that the people that we would maybe identify with the most have been omitted from what’s taught to us… but I remember I heard you speak at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, in the context of the ‘Radical Latina’ show. I was blown away and touched. I had never heard another artist speak about things so important to me with such a level of intimacy. I felt you were reading my most private thoughts in the studio. It was quite emotional to realize that you existed.

Cecilia Vicuña: For me to encounter you, Teresita, is to see the same sensibility, the same spirit, but expressed in a different language: an indigenous sensibility where you are sensing that the world is going up in flames, but you’re not thinking about it, you are feeling it, from within. It’s not about the burning—it is the burning itself. But you come from a language that relates much more to contemporary art as expressed here in the U.S., and I suppose that is the tension that makes your work so vibrant, so potent.

LvS: And though your output is very different, you each try to push the formal and conceptual ideas of what landscape can be and what it means to think about place, both in terms of postcolonialism and in terms of the universe itself.

TF: People think of my work as being about landscape, but I’ve tried in my practice to amplify the word ‘landscape,’ just like the word ‘climate.’ Landscape is much more about what you don’t see than what you do see. There is important knowledge inherent in remembering that we are a tiny part of this whole thing. We’re not just witnessing it, watching it, outside of it, assessing it. Our bodies are running on the same exact systems as the rest of the universe.

CV: Yes. That cosmic perspective is the core of indigenous thinking. This idea that the cosmos is away, is distant—this is completely ridiculous. We are the cosmos. The cosmos is inside of us. 

TF: What I see and relate to when I look at Cecilia’s work is this insistence on something being more than one thing at once. We’re always asked to choose between beauty and politics, or poetry and intellectual rigor, as though things fit into one category or another. But there’s a power to understanding that those things are all the same. So, the beautiful is political. The poetic is also intellectually rigorous. And the historical is also the present…

LvS: To paraphrase a quote of yours, Teresita: The intimate is vast; the tiny is immense.

TF: That… and I feel this when I hear Cecilia speak as well: how it is important to represent complexity. It’s the same thing when people talk about identity. There are a lot of different layers.

LvS: And you each use materials—very different ones—to create or suggest those layers…

TF: Material intelligence—the idea that there is an intelligence that materials themselves have—is something that both of our work has in common.… Because materials aren’t just materials; materials are parts of places. When I make a new landscape out of charcoal, something that used to be a burned tree, I’m creating what I refer to as ‘stacked landscapes’—multiple things happening at once. It’s one of the things that I love about Cecilia’s work too: There’s more than meets the eye. There’s what you’re looking at, there is what you think you’re looking at, and there’s what you’ll see if you look harder.

LvS: Today, with the Amazon burning as it is, and with you both exhibiting work in Miami, which is already suffering from the climate crisis and at great further risk, I am thinking of something Cecilia once said related to an earlier version of ‘About to Happen’—about the folly of the Judeo-Christian-slash-Western notion that nature is to be controlled and dominated so that when you destroy it, it doesn’t matter.

CV: Exactly… that the Earth was created for the use of human beings. If you look at the news today, that’s exactly what the Brazilian president is saying: Brazil is ours, the indigenous lands are ours, and we need to profit from them because God gave us this. This is preposterous.… The Amazon is a core point on which the life of the entire planet depends. This is understood now by people around the world, but it’s painful to see Brazil resisting as if that perception were foreign when it is exactly emerging from the land itself.… As Teresita is describing, it’s a planetary process; every glacier, every mountain, every forest and every river participates.

TF: [And] it’s convenient to think of the Amazon here and colonization as ‘over there.’ As Cecilia says, what you call something is important; so when you say ‘climate’ and you separate that from ‘border,’ from ‘indignity,’ from ‘colonization’—in fact, all of those things interconnect and define one another.

CV: And unless we understand it this way, we’re going to continue to destroy everything.… This extinction of the species, this extinction of humanities, of languages, of worldviews is the most violent act that we are creating against our own future as humanity. And on the other side, for example, plastic is monstrous because it doesn’t disappear. So whatever you do in relation to that idea—a song, poem, a dance, a painting—is, as Teresita says, like shadows of that immense reality that exists not only in the Amazon but in the whole world. I’m sure if there is humanity in the future, people will feel that way. 

‘Teresita Fernández: Elemental’ is on view at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) through February 9, 2020. ‘Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen’ is on view at Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (MOCA) December 2 through March 29, 2020. Both artists will have work on view with Lehmann Maupin at Art Basel Miami Beach.

‘Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen’ is organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (CAC), and co-curated by Andrea Andersson, The Helis Foundation Chief Curator of Visual Arts at the CAC, and Julia Bryan-Wilson, Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley.

Teresita Fernández is represented by Lehmann Maupin (New York, Hong Kong, Seoul), and Anthony Meier Fine Arts (San Francisco). Cecilia Vicuña is represented by Lehmann Maupin.

Top image: Cecilia Vicuña, El Paro/The Strike (detail), 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul.