The Museum of Contemporary, Los Angeles, presents Cecilia Vicuña's The Dream of Water: Quipu of Encounters Maricunga, an Inaugural Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize Exhibition
On view at MOCA Grand Avenue
November 15, 2026–June 6, 2027
250 S. Grand Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90012
LOS ANGELES, Oct. 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) proudly presents Cecilia Vicuña's The Dream of Water: Quipu of Encounters Maricunga. One of two inaugural Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize exhibitions presented at MOCA Grand Avenue this fall, The Dream of Water is on view from November 15, 2026, through June 6, 2027 alongside Julian Charrière: Deep End, the French-Swiss artist's first solo museum show in Los Angeles. Together, these two exhibitions reflect the Prize's commitment to artists working at the intersections of art, climate, and environmental justice.
The word quipu (kee-poo) comes from the Quechua word for "knot." Usually consisting of colored, spun and plied thread, historic documents indicate that quipus were used for record keeping and sending messages by runners throughout the empire. Vicuña has reimagined the Andean Pre-Columbian quipu system of non-writing with knots through ritual acts that weave the urban landscape, rivers and oceans, as well as people, to re-construct a sense of unity and awareness of interconnectivity.
MOCA Senior Curator José Luis Blondet explains: "As a poet, Vicuña is less concerned with the quipu's archaeological dimension than with its endless metaphorical power. Her engagement with the quipu began in the early 1960s, prompted by the realization that these extraordinary artifacts were also about memory, about the big loss of ancestral knowledge. The artist's first quipu was a note in her journal: El quipu que no recuerda nada (The quipu that remembers nothing)."
For her MOCA project, Vicuña focuses on the ecological crisis unfolding in the Maricunga Salt Flats, located in the southernmost part of the Atacama Desert. Ancient salt flats and high-Andean lagoons sustain extraordinary microbial communities, parinas (Andean flamingos), plants, and other species, while also forming part of the ancestral territory of the Indigenous Colla people, who regard this land as sacred. Today, these fragile ecosystems–and the communities that have called this territory home for generations–face increasing threats from corporate lithium mining, whose highly water-intensive practices place additional pressure on the region's already scarce water resources, which are essential to life in this region.
Suspended in MOCA's tallest gallery, Parina Quipu (2026) is a vibrant sculpture made of unspun wool, sheared by artisans from the Cauquenes area in Southern Chile and naturally dyed primarily in vivid shades of pink, interwoven with smaller sections of yellow, green, orange, purple, black, brown, and gray. The wool's brilliant pink hues evoke the plumage of the parina, or Andean flamingo, struggling to continue to nest in their natural habitat. In the adjacent gallery, Salar de Maricunga Quipu de Encuentro (2026), a five-channel video installation assembled from footage recorded during the artist's two journeys to Maricunga in December 2025 and May 2026. Moving from dusk to dawn across the Atacama landscape, the non-narrative videos capture the region's rich biodiversity, from unique microorganisms to breathtaking landscapes and diverse species, while also documenting two rituals performed by the artist and her collaborators, including scientists, artists, film-makers, activists, and members of the Colla community. Vicuña invited British musician Cosmo Sheldrake to compose Canto de Maricunga (2026), a polyphonic sound poem weaving together underwater sounds, cosmic radio waves, and field recordings from the Quipu de Encuentro in Maricunga, including Chilean musical ensemble La Chimuchina playing a variety of ancestral Andean instruments along with Vicuña's chants and voices from the participants in the ritual.
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. In the Spring 2027, the artist will hold a "quipu of encounters" at MOCA, bringing together artists, activists, scientists, and water defenders from across the Los Angeles basin in a collective ritual. This quipu will act as a counterpart to her engagements in the Atacama Desert, bridging the communities in poetic and political exchanges that confront the ongoing water crises unfolding in each region. Also known as 'Living Quipus,' recent Quipus of Encounters have taken place around the glaciers in Chile: Quipu de Encuentros Juncal-Aconcagua (March 2024); at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York: Ex-termination Living Quipu (August 2022) and Quipu of Encounters: A Pedagogy of Being (October 2023 – January 2024); at the Tate Modern, London: Quipu of Encounters: Rituals and Assembly (October 2022); as well as at Organizmo, Cundinamarca, Colombia; MALBA, Buenos Aires; and MUAC, Mexico City, in 2020.
Clara Kim, Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs at MOCA stated: "Cecilia Vicuña is one of the most extraordinary and powerful voices working at the intersection of contemporary art, the environment and indigenous cultures. Her practice has turned the ancient quipu, a knotted record, into a living act of listening, one that connects deserts, rivers, and communities across the Americas through poetry and action. The Dream of Water invites visitors into that conversation, asking us to consider how water binds us together and how much we stand to lose without it. We are grateful to Eric and Wendy Schmidt, whose Environment and Art Prize makes it possible to bring urgent practices and projects like Vicuña's to Los Angeles."
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.
The Dream of Water: Quipu of Encounters Maricunga will be accompanied by an illustrated exhibition catalogue published by MOCA in Spring 2027. The catalogue will feature a conversation with the artist and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Professor in the UCLA Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, alongside new essays by the artist's advisors: José de Nordenflycht, Cristina Dorador, Romina Figueroa Berrios, Claudio Mercado, and José Pérez de Arce.
PUBLIC PROGRAM
Cecilia Vicuña in Conversation with Elizabeth DeLoughrey
Sunday, November 15, 2026, 3 p.m.
Ahmanson Auditorium, MOCA Grand Avenue
Join artist Cecilia Vicuña and UCLA professor Elizabeth DeLoughrey for a conversation on water, memory, and the ancient art of the quipu. Vicuña and DeLoughrey will discuss the ideas behind The Dream of Water: Quipu of Encounters Maricunga, the artist's new exhibition at MOCA Grand Avenue, which opens the same day.
Elizabeth DeLoughrey is a professor in the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. Her work examines environmental literature and art through a postcolonial lens.
ABOUT THE ERIC AND WENDY SCHMIDT ENVIRONMENT AND ART PRIZE
The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize is a juried prize that supports artists whose practices address critical intersections in art, architecture, design, climate, conservation, sustainability, and environmental justice. Funded by philanthropists Eric and Wendy Schmidt, the prize will be awarded every two years, from 2024 to 2030. Winners receive a $100,000 unrestricted honorarium and additional resources from MOCA to develop and present new work that promotes ecological well-being and environmental justice. In addition to the commissioned artwork, each winner is encouraged to select an advisor with expertise in climate science, environmental justice, or sustainability who will collaborate on the project's development and context.
ABOUT CECILIA VICUÑA
Cecilia Vicuña (Santiago de Chile, 1948) is a visual artist, poet, filmmaker and activist based in New York. Her poetic work in space, performance and visual arts is considered a decolonizing vision that anticipated ecofeminism. She coined the term "Arte Precario" in the mid-1960s in Chile as a new independent and non-colonized category for her precarious works composed of structures that disappear in the landscape, and in 1974, while in London, she co-founded the collective Artists for Democracy. Vicuña has re-invented the ancient Pre-Columbian quipu system of non-writing with knots through ritual acts that weave the urban landscape, rivers and oceans, as well as people, to re-construct a sense of unity and awareness of interconnectivity. These works bridge art and poetry as a way of "hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard." In recent years Vicuña has exhibited at Turbine Hall, TATE, London; Guggenheim Museum, New York; MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York; Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; Kunstinstitutt Melly (ex Witte de With) Rotterdam, The Netherlands; MUAC, Mexico; CA2M, Madrid, where she received the Velasquez Award; and Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia (MAMU), Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia. Her retrospective Soñar el agua was recently on view at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago de Chile, and MALBA, Buenos Aires and is currently on view at the Pinacoteca, São Paulo. She received the Golden Lion Award for her trajectory at the 59th Venice Biennale, 2022. Her work is collected in major institutions around the world. In February 2023 she was elected Honorary Foreign Member of the Academy of Arts and Letters of the United States, and Dr. Honoris Causa by Universidad de Chile.
