Cecilia Vicuña: Sonoran Quipu

Opening Weekend: January 27 & 28, 2023

This January MOCA Tucson debuts Sonoran Quipu, a new exhibition from internationally celebrated artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña.

Sonoran Quipu is an immersive installation that fills MOCA’s Great Hall with hundreds of hanging fibers and small sculptures composed of found objects and plant materials. The project evokes ancient quipus ("knots" in Quechua), which are Indigenous Andean recording devices. Vicuna's newly commissioned quipu is dedicated to the desert flora, and will be created from materials gathered collectively by participants in Tucson. The artist will carefully compose the contributed items into an installation, creating a poem in space that enlarges the ancient form of the quipu and celebrates present-day materials from the Sonoran Desert.

The exhibition is rooted in the ecologies and cosmologies of the Southwest, as seen from Vicuña’s Andean perspective, and invites viewers to consider our interconnected relationship to the environment and to each other.

Contribute To Sonoran Quipu

The artist and the museum invite you to collect plant matter and found debris from your surroundings to be woven into the Sonoran Quipu. Items may be dropped off during MOCA’s open hours. Contributors will receive free admission to the museum and will be acknowledged in the exhibition’s brochure. 

Materials to collect and contribute might include: seed pods, dried plants, twigs, broken jewelry, natural or synthetic fibers, plastics, bits of metal, small pieces of wood, and remnants from carpentry, mechanical workshops, studios, or home work.

Find out more here.

Responsible Collection Tips:
Limit collection to what you can find in your garden, yard, stoop, studio, or sidewalk. Refrain from collecting plant matter from city, state, or federally owned and operated sites. Only collect material that is no longer living or attached to a living plant, like seed pods that have fallen to the ground, or stray twigs underfoot.