There are three Cecilias in Cecilia Vicuña’s Black Panther and Me (ii): a larger figure and two smaller selves attached to her. The Chilean artist explained that detail in MoMA’s audio guide for the 1978 painting. A panther crouches nearby. One hand holds a birth-control pill. None of these elements sits quietly inside a reassuring self-portrait. Together they turn a painted body into a place where politics, medicine, childhood, and desire argue at once.
Vicuña said she supported the Black Panther Party’s struggle for liberation and did not separate it from her own. She also described the animal in her painting as poised for play rather than an attack. That choice matters. Solidarity here does not require her to borrow someone else’s danger as a costume. The panther’s ambiguous posture gives the image motion and pleasure, while the title names a political kinship the artist chose to claim. The painting’s force lies in that combination, not in a single symbolic key that unlocks every object.
The pill carries a different kind of claim. Vicuña told MoMA that contraception prevented pregnancy but caused side effects, and she believed a better pill could have been made. The detail refuses a simplistic celebration of medical progress. A technology can widen one freedom while imposing costs on the body expected to use it. Placing it in her own hand makes the issue intimate without making it merely private.
The work appeared in MoMA’s 2024 exhibition Vital Signs: Artists and the Body. The museum identifies Vicuña as Chilean, born in 1948, and records the canvas as oil paint. In the audio guide she described painting what others perceived as her imperfection as an act of love for a younger self. That account offers a way to approach the three figures: not as a before-and-after sequence leading to a corrected adult, but as selves that remain present together. Self-acceptance is ongoing work, not a finished portrait.
Vicuña’s own explanation sharpens what is at stake in those painted choices. The large figure, the smaller figures, the pill, and the panther refuse the demand that a Latin American woman present a coherent, palatable identity for approval. Vicuña lets the picture contain political alliance and bodily uncertainty without resolving either. In a visual culture that routinely treats women’s bodies as surfaces to improve, that refusal has a clear edge: the body can speak about its own terms, even when its story makes the viewer uncomfortable.