World Poetry Salon: Cecilia Vicuña, Ricardo Gallo, and Patricio Ferrari

Join The New York Public Library and Limelight Poetry at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library (SNFL) for a World Poetry Salon event!

Experience words and music from around the globe at the World Poetry Salon, a new series presented in partnership with Limelight Poetry, a local nonprofit dedicated to promoting world poetry. Each event features readings by a celebrated poet set to live music by a musician of the same cultural background. 

This salon will feature a reading by Cecilia Vicuña accompanied by musician Ricardo Gallo. A printout will be available for attendees to follow along with Vicuña's poetry during the reading. Following the reading, Šteger will be interviewed by event host Patricio Ferrari.

Cecilia Vicuña's poetic work in space, performance and visual arts is considered a decolonizing vision that anticipates ecofeminism. She created the autonomous concept of "Precarious Art" in the mid-1960s in Chile to name what disappears. “Arte Precario” stands as a new independent and non-colonized category for her precarious works composed of structures that disappear in the landscape, which include her quipus (knot in Quechua), envisioned as poems in space. She was a co-founder of Artists for Democracy in London in l974. 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.”

To join in person | Please be sure to register for an In-Person Ticket. Doors will open 30 minutes before the program begins.

For free events, we generally overbook to ensure a full house. Priority will be given to those who have registered in advance, but registration does not guarantee admission. If you register for multiple tickets, please provide the name of each person who will be attending the event or arrive with your entire party present. Only registered patrons will be granted entry into the event space. All registered seats are released shortly before start time, and seats may become available at that time. A standby line will form 30 minutes before the program.

To join online | On the day of the event, registrants will receive a Youtube link to join the program. To receive an email reminder shortly in advance of the event, please be sure to register! If you encounter any issues, please join us on NYPL's YouTube channel.

ABOUT LIMELIGHT POETRY

Limelight Poetry is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting world poetry, founded in 2024 in New York City. It invites outstanding poets and artists from around the world to share their work in various forms, with the goal of showcasing poetry in underrepresented languages. Drawing on the city's rich cultural resources, Limelight Poetry connects poetry with other art forms, fostering a global exchange of poetic expression. It welcomes audiences into a vibrant and inspiring world of poetry, music and beyond.

ABOUT THE POET

Cecilia Vicuña (Santiago de Chile, 1948) is a visual artist, poet, filmmaker and activist based in New York. In recent years Vicuña has exhibited at the Toronto Biennial; Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Turbine Hall, TATE, London; Guggenheim Museum, New York; MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York; Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; Kunstinstitutt Melly, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; MUAC, Mexico; CA2M, Madrid; 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 the Pinacoteca, Sao Paulo. Her monumental quipus are currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and Pérez Art Museum Miami, and her work is the subject of a solo presentation at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.

In 2019 she was the recipient of the Premio Velázquez de Artes Plásticas, awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture. She received the Golden Lion Award for her trajectory at the 59th Venice Biennale. In February 2023 she was elected Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was granted a doctorate Honoris Causa by Universidad de Chile. She was the winner of the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas de Chile 2023, one of the most prestigious awards given by her homeland. In 2024 she was awarded MOCA LA’s inaugural Art and Environment Prize.

ABOUT THE MUSICIAN

Born in Bogotá, Colombia and based in New York, composer Ricardo Gallo has written for acoustic and electro-acoustic formats, for short films, videos, dance, installations, and multimedia stage productions, and has performed and written for improvisatory groups. He has published fourteen albums as a leader, his music has appeared in several compilations in Colombia, USA, and Europe, and has participated in recordings of several other groups. In New York, he leads the tropical-electric-groovy band Los ALiENs and the acoustic quartet Horse’s Mouth as well as other formations.

Since 2016 Gallo has collaborated with Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña, performing as a duo in the U.S., Chile, and Colombia. For Vicuña’s Brain Forest Quipu, her commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London in 2022, Gallo directed the contribution of several musicians and also arranged and designed the “Sound Quipu” – the sonic component of the piece. In 2018 he created the sound design for Cecilia’s Disappeared Quipu, a multimedia installation for the Brooklyn Museum and MFA in Boston, and composed a piece based on her poetry commissioned by Ensemble Ipse. Vicuña and Gallo have created other sound pieces for the Gwangju Biennale in Korea, Moca Tucson in Arizona, Ballroom Marfa in Texas, and Somerset House in London, all based on Cecilia’s chants and poetry. They released the album La niebla vital, Wiraqochan in 2022 with Hueso Records.

ABOUT THE HOST

Patricio Ferrari (polyglot poet, translator, editor) was born in Buenos Aires and left home at sixteen, when he began a lifelong journey across continents and languages. He has since shaped a multilingual poetics that explores belonging, displacement, and the in-between. In 2025, he was awarded the Fence Modern Poets Series Prize for Mud Songs, the first volume of Elsehere, a trilogy charting how each language molds and reveals a different facet of the self—what he calls heterophony, the process of self- othering through an adopted tongue.

BOOKS AND MORE

If you have an NYPL library card, you can borrow e-books related to this event on your favorite devices. Learn more: nypl.org/ebookhelp.

Don't have a New York Public Library card? Get one here!

ACCESSIBILITY

In-Person

• You can request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning service by emailing your request at least two weeks in advance of the event: email [email protected].


• This venue is fully accessible to wheelchairs.

Online

• Live captioning will be provided.


• You can request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation by emailing your request at least two weeks in advance of the event: email [email protected].

CONNECT

For general questions, please email [email protected].

Please submit all press inquiries at least 48 hours before the event: email [email protected].