Congratulations to Claudia Alarcón & Silät on receiving ARTnews Awards 2025 Emerging Artist of the Year!
The awards were juried this year by five of the US’s top curators, as well as two ARTnews editors. This year’s jury includes Victoria Sung, Phyllis C. Wattis Senior Curator, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Ruba Katrib, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, MoMA PS1, New York; Ryan N. Dennis, Co-Director and Chief Curator, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Anne Ellegood, Executive Director, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Rosario Güiraldes, Curator of Visual Arts, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Alex Greenberger, Senior Editor, ARTnews; and Maximilíano Durón, Senior Editor, ARTnews.
For over a decade, Claudia Alarcón has been immortalizing aspects of Wichí lore in the form of weavings, many of them produced collaboratively with an all-women group of weavers called Silät that was formed by curator Andrei Fernández. Working in Argentina’s Salta province, these women have used traditional Wichí techniques to give physical form to narratives that are normally transmitted orally.
Alarcón, who also works solo, has been credited in Argentina as the first Indigenous woman to exhibit her work as art, not craft, at the country’s foremost art fair. In that way, she has blazed a new trail for members of her community, whose weavings have typically only been viewed in Argentina as craft. “Before it was always seen as crafts, not as art,” Alarcón told ARTnews earlier this year of her work. “We want to show people the meaning that it has for us.”
One year after appearing the Venice Biennale, her US debut showed off all the meaning that her work has to offer. Staged by New York’s James Cohan Gallery and co-organized with Alarcón’s London gallery, Cecilia Brunson Projects, the show featured a range of weavings that enlist the yica stitch, a loop of yarn that Wichí women are taught when they are young. Yica stitches hang loose and are commonly used in garments such as the crossbody bags worn daily by Wichí people. Utilizing these stitches, Alarcón and Silät’s intergenerational membership collectively made this exhibition’s wall-hung weavings, which served a less functional purpose.
Certain weavings referred directly to the centuries-old Wichí tale about how women descended from the stars on chaguar fibers and then used that plant to make their own weavings. Star-shaped forms accordingly appear in some works alongside abstract patterns that have been utilized by Wichí people for a very long time. Other works playfully needled the false craft/art dichotomy. Un coro de yicas [A chorus of yicas] (2024) was a wall-hung installation composed of crossbody bags that Silät might typically sell at craft fairs. But here, they showed how these objects can equally be appreciated for their aesthetics and not simply their utilitarian value. Notably, there were exactly 100 bags—one for each member of Silät.