Artist Talk: Guadalupe Maravilla

This program is online via Zoom. 

FREE
Registration recommended.

Artist Guadalupe Maravilla joins Hirshhorn curator Marina Isgro online via Zoom to explore how art can be a tool for activism and healing.

Maravilla’s transdisciplinary work engages with a wide variety of visual cultures as well as his personal experiences, from his arrival in the United States as an unaccompanied migrant fleeing the Salvadoran Civil War to, more recently, overcoming colon cancer. Through painting, performance, sculpture, and workshops, he creates opportunities for audiences to grapple with issues of migration and generational trauma while establishing space and rituals for care, healing, and regeneration.

Maravilla’s 2021 work Disease Thrower #12 recently entered the Hirshhorn’s collection. The sculpture incorporates a mix of materials, including a gong, steel, wood, cotton, loofah, and other objects collected from a ritual of retracing the artist’s original migration route. Like other works in his Disease Thrower series, the work can be activated through performance to encourage meditative and healing processes.

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

Combining sculpture, painting, performative acts, and installation, Guadalupe Maravilla (b. 1976) grounds his transdisciplinary practice in activism and healing. Engaging a wide variety of visual cultures, Maravilla’s work is autobiographical, referencing his unaccompanied, undocumented migration to the United States due to the Salvadoran Civil War. Across all media, Maravilla explores how the systemic abuse of immigrants physically manifests in the body, reflecting on his own battle with cancer. Maravilla received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts and his MFA from Hunter College in New York. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, Norway; and Brooklyn Museum, New York, among others. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 2019; Soros Fellowship: Art, Migration, and Public Space, 2019; MAP Fund Grant, 2019; Franklin Furnace Fund, 2018; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, 2018; Art Matters Fellowship, 2017; Creative Capital Grant, 2016; Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, 2016; and The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation Award, 2003. He has presented solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art; Brooklyn Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, Colorado; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; P·P·O·W, New York; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, among others. His work has been included in recent group exhibitions such as the Liverpool Biennial, uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things, United Kingdom; 14th Gwangju Biennale, soft and weak like water, South Korea; Drum Listens to Heart: Part III, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, California; Crip Time, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; and Stories of Resistance, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Missouri, among others. Maravilla’s work is currently included in the 12th Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, forms of the surrounding futures, Gothenburg, Sweden; and the 35th Bienal de São Paulo, choreographies of the impossible, Brazil.

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SCHEDULE

11:50 am EST | Zoom broadcast opens

Noon EST | Guadalupe Maravilla in conversation with Marina Isgro

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ASL translation will be provided on Zoom, and CART (real-time captioning) will be provided across all platforms. If you have any questions about accessibility for this program, please email hirshhornexperience@si.edu.