The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles will present Cecilia Vicuña's The Dream of Water: Quipu of Encounters Maricunga at MOCA Grand Avenue from 15 November 2026 through 6 June 2027, one of the two first exhibitions under the new Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize, the museum announced on 20 October. The second inaugural exhibition, Julian Charrière: Deep End, gives the French-Swiss artist his first solo museum show in Los Angeles. Together, the two exhibitions anchor the prize's commitment to artists working where art, climate and environmental justice intersect.

The title draws on the Quechua word quipu, meaning knot, recalling the Andean system of knotted cords once used for record-keeping and messaging across the Incan empire. Vicuña has reimagined that pre-Columbian system through ritual acts that weave together the urban landscape, rivers and oceans, and the people who inhabit them, aiming to reconstruct a sense of unity and awareness of interconnectivity. Her engagement with the quipu goes back to the early 1960s, when she grasped that the knotted objects were about memory and the loss of ancestral knowledge — her first quipu was a note in her journal titled The quipu that remembers nothing.

MOCA Senior Curator José Luis Blondet frames Vicuña as a poet for whom the archaeological dimension of the quipu matters less than its metaphorical power. The Los Angeles presentation extends the Chilean artist's long practice of turning Andean cultural memory into forms that confront ecological damage. The show's title invokes the Salar de Maricunga, the salt flat region tied to water extraction conflicts, placing the work firmly within current struggles over water in the Andes.