Published in conjunction with the artist’s comprehensive exhibition retrospective curated by Miguel A. López, and held at Witte de With from May–November 2019.

This publication gives an overview of Vicuña’s artistic practice as a poet, visual artist, and activist from the 1960s to the present day. It is edited by López, designed by Studio Manuel Raeder, Berlin, and includes a forward by Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, new essays by Miguel A. López, Julia Bryan-Wilson and Carla María Macchiavello, existing essays by Lucy Lippard and Dawn Adès and an anthology of texts authored by Cecilia Vicuña.

It includes color and black and white photography of more than 120 artworks by Vicuña, encompassing the full range of Vicuña’s body of work: textiles, poetry, performances, film, collages, drawings, paintings, precarious objects, and activism. A chapter in the book is especially devoted to these images, which are organized in four thematic sections.

The Artist As is based on a lecture series with the same title that ran throughout 2016. It was presented at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane, and at Monash University’s Faculty of Art Design & Architecture (MADA), Melbourne, as part of the Curatorial Practice program.

“How do artists work today? What kinds of roles do they occupy, have these roles changed over the years, and how does this impact the ecology of art?” These are some of the questions that contributors Brook Andrew, Walter Benjamin, Heman Chong, Ekaterina Degot, Hal Foster, Helen Hughes, Helen Johnson, Isabel Lewis, Adam Linder, Suhail Malik, Tara McDowell, Emily Pethick, Terry Smith, Cecilia Vicuña, and Tirdad Zolghadr, seeks to address in this reader.

The Artist As is edited by Aileen Burns, Johan Lundh, and Tara McDowell. Designed by Ziga Testen and Robert Milne.