Guadalupe Maravilla:

Purring Monsters with Mirrors on Their Backs

About the exhibition 

Guadalupe Maravilla is a transdisciplinary artist, healer, and activist, born in San Salvador, El Salvador, who utilizes his practice as a forum for collective healing. Anchored by the integration of his autobiographical experiences with issues of migration, displacement, and illness, Maravilla’s work centers communities that have historically been marginalized. Maravilla uses art to shed light on the collective traumas of undocumented immigrants and cancer survivors and empowers them with the tools to assist with their process of healing. For his exhibition at the MCA Denver, Maravilla will present new and recent work including a Retablo painting, a site-specific Tripa Chuca mural, and three Disease Throwers sculptures, one of which was specially commissioned for the exhibition.

(Click here to listen to guest curator, Larry Ossei-Mensah, speak about his work with Maravilla on this exhibition).

Guadalupe Maravilla (born 1976) came to the United States as an unaccompanied minor in 1984 fleeing war in his native El Salvador. While earning his MFA at Hunter College, Maravilla was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. These challenges inform Maravilla’s practice and are expressed within the suite of works in this exhibition: the Disease Throwers that feature calibrated gongs and plastic replicas of organs, the Retablo painting, and the Tripa Chuca murals. Maravilla uses sound, ritual, and collaboration to create spaces for communities that relate to his own communal history. Acknowledging the global effects of COVID-19 and wealth disparity, Maravilla welcomes all visitors to engage with his practice but is particularly attuned to creating a space of welcome for undocumented immigrants, the Latinx and Central American community, the working class, and cancer survivors.

The Disease Throwers, begun in 2019, are a series of sculptures that take a variety of forms such as headdresses, shrines, and healing instruments. These sculptures, when activated during Maravilla’s sound bath ceremonies, create portals. The exhibition features Disease Thrower #17, 2021 which like many of the sculptures, includes objects that range from the quotidian to the sacred, such as wood, loofahs, an anatomical model of a snake head and heart, obsidian, and six gongs that are activated during his sound bath ceremonies. Made of cast aluminum and steel tubing Disease Thrower #14, 2021 reflects Maravilla’s adoption of new, more durable materials for his 2021 outdoor exhibition at Socrates Sculpture Park. These sculptures, along with the new Disease Thrower commissioned by MCA Denver, will be activated during a series of sound bath ceremonies on July 16 and 17. 

The exhibition also features a new site-specific mural by Maravilla that is created by playing Tripa Chuca, a game Maravilla enjoyed as a child in El Salvador. The game Tripa Chuca provided the artist with comfort and cultivated a bonding experience with the other people he was traveling with during his migration from El Salvador to the United States. Hence, the process of drawing to create the Tripa Chuca mural centers on the importance of Maravilla forming a bond with his collaborator while creating a forum to explore notions of displacement, mapping, and abstraction as a form of storytelling.