Guadalupe Maravilla’s Tierra Blanca Joven at the Brooklyn Museum consists of “Disease Throwers”—large sculptures that function as healing sound baths, a curation of Mayan artifacts from the museum’s collection, video performance, and a community healing room.

These university museum leaders are bridging cultural chasms through elaborate and generative work with their students.

From Genesis P-Orridge at Pioneer Works to Louise Bourgeois at the Met, our pick of the best exhibitions in the city this week

The artist, who fled the violence of the civil war in El Salvador as a child, incorporates ritual gongs into his sculptures, on view in the show “Tierra Blanca Joven,” at the Brooklyn Museum.

Guadalupe Maravilla's practice and resulting artworks centre mostly on healing as an individual and societal tool to overcome trauma, drawing from his background as a child of war and experiences as a cancer survivor to build spaces focused on communal care and healing across generations.

It was terrifying, but there was so much beauty and magic.

That's how the artist Guadalupe Maravilla describes much of his life. And it could also be said for his work — looming sculptures and haunting sound art — exhibitions of which are currently being shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

The Salvadoran artist talks to Aruna D’Souza about retracing his childhood migration through Central America and Mexico, collectively healing trauma and performing in the dark

New York Art Week, which runs May 5th through 12th, is the latest evolution in the city’s always mercurial art fair scene. In the past, major fairs have spawned numerous satellite events, and organizations across the city have tried to capitalize on the monied collectors who flock here for the marquee events. New York Art Week is a unique endeavor in that it’s the first attempt to bring together many of these actors under one banner with a focused mission.

In memory of Stephanie, and in honor of Alejandro.

A new exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum showcases the work of multidisciplinary artist Guadalupe Maravilla, the first contemporary Central American artist to have a solo show at the Museum. 

El artista salvadoreño Guadalupe Maravilla ha convertido dos salas del museo Henie Onstad de Oslo en un manifiesto a favor de los poderes curativos del arte. Sound Botánica, su primera gran exposición individual en Europa, explora cómo la pintura o la instalación pueden enfrentarse a la enfermedad y el trauma, al tiempo que revisten el centro expositivo de un aura espiritual.

Guadalupe Maravilla’s sculptures at the Brooklyn Museum and MoMA explore the trauma caused by war, migration and family separation.

Plus, solo shows for Stan Squirewell, Rebecca Ward, Madjeen Isaac, and more.

Plus, check out the latest edition of our Artnet Talks and see works by Brazilian artist Amelia Toledo.

Bodies surged toward the front doors of LAGO, whose opening bash had just reached capacity. The crowd pleaded desperately to security guards for entry. Someone began pushing and faces flattened against glass. Everyone was on the list, but no one could get in. The more intrepid guests circled around the back of the pavilion, toward the dark, brackish lake. Security guards rushed to pull us off planters. Through the windows, a golden pendulum by Artur Lescher and a James Turrell window, radiating neon pink, seemed unperturbed by the invading horde—or, for that matter, the steady throb of Tulum house on the dance floor.

Guadalupe Maravilla’s “Planeta Abuelx” at Socrates Sculpture Park provided a welcome respite for pandemic times. Offering a space for meditation, healing, and recovery, the project reflected Maravilla’s engagement with mutual aid and therapy, focusing on the ways that art can sustain, restore, and provide solace. A cancer survivor and immigrant who escaped El Salvador’s bloody civil war, Maravilla understands the nature of trauma. These experiences, along with childhood memories, rituals, and traditional medicine, form the basis of his practice and its recuperative and communal purpose.

Participating institutions include the Brooklyn Museum, the Gropius Bau in Berlin, and the Museum of Art and Photography in Bengaluru, India.

These acquisitions may be a good barometer to track the success that Latinx art (used here to describe artists based in the United States, primarily but not limited to those born here or having arrived as children, with a heritage to Latin America and the Caribbean) is currently having within the art world. The fight for recognition has been ongoing since it was initiated in the late 1960s by artists, activists, and curators, and right now presents what some might call a moment for Latinx art. 

As 2021 comes to a close, we’re taking the time to look back on the shows in the U.S. and around the world that we feel had the greatest impact. Like the year before, this year was again marked by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. But it had many more bright spots. Thanks to the vaccine, we saw the return of in-person shows, fairs, biennales, and events. Artists took the tumultuous times head-on, continuing to make work, sometimes addressing it directly, sometimes not. Curators took on subjects that ranged from themes like grief, connection, and even clay. There was joy, sadness, a celebration of humanity. Whether looking to the past, present, or future, we found ourselves once again communing with art, artists, and the thing that moves us most of all, beauty.

As the city reopened, the art world saw legacy-changing donations for the Met and the Brooklyn Museum, and a seismic shift in Tribeca’s gallery scene.

After a tumultuous 2020 that involved the beginnings of a pandemic and worldwide upheaval, the art world began to slowly go back to a form of normal in 2021. Along with that shift came a number of developments that brought art-making in new and unexpected developments. There was the rise of a new medium, and there was the return of performance art. There were artworks that spoke to a continued reckoning with systemic racism, and there were powerful pieces that offered forms of healing in a time when illness was prevalent. There was no shortage of creativity on display. The list below, featuring 15 works that defined this year, attests to that.

In August 2020, a Pew Research Center poll discovered that just three percent of the Hispanic population in the United States identifies as Latinx. The director of race and ethnicity research Mark Lopez explained that their rejection of the word had nothing to do with its inclusive framework, but rather its the limited means to describe the population as a whole. The outcome, he said, “reflects the diversity of the nation’s Hispanic population, and the Hispanic population of the U.S. thinks of itself in many different ways.”

At Socrates Sculpture Park, Guadalupe Maravilla transforms works of art into therapeutic instruments.

Who better to practice healing than the sick, who have likely experimented relentlessly, and who manage their own bodies every day? The El Salvador–born, New York–based artist Guadalupe Maravilla has channeled his experience with cancer and migration into a healing-focused practice.

In 1984, eight-year-old Guadalupe Maravilla left his family and joined a group of other children fleeing their homes in El Salvador. The Central American country was in the midst of a brutal civil war, a profoundly traumatic experience that’s left an indelible impact on the artist and one that guides his broad, multi-disciplinary practice to this day.

The picture frame has a long history of underappreciation. For centuries, collectors and museums treated frames as afterthoughts to the artworks they contained, swapping them out according to changing tastes or to match their immediate surroundings. The New York frame dealer Eli Wilner recounted that even in the 1980s, major galleries gave him their unwanted antique frames for free.

The new series Migrant Futures is aimed at pushing forward our thinking and action about immigration and borders.

Though it’s tempting to hole up inside to escape the summer heat, meaningful art makes a sunny jaunt worth the trip. Crafted with the intention to provoke thought and help us catch our collective breath, temporary art installations by Sam Durant, Melvin Edwards, Mimi Lien, Guadalupe Maravilla and Sam Moyer installed across Manhattan and Queens this season are both grounding and impactful. 

Three L.A. artists are among 15 people receiving $50,000 each as the inaugural winners of the newly established Latinx Artist Fellowship, a program administered by the U.S. Latinx Art Forum with support from the Andrew W. Mellon and Ford foundations.

The Ford Foundation and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will give 75 artists $50,000 each.

Two of the country’s largest philanthropic organizations have joined forces for a new initiative that aims to bring visibility to Latinx art in the United States.

As part of a collaboration with Art21, hear news-making artists describe their inspirations in their own words.

These spaces nudge you toward unexpected art surprises and offer vistas of healing and history.

June is reopening month for New York City! With the weather warming up, the city has lots of outdoor art premiering in fun destinations to check out.

Healing, and self-care in general, is a major industry right now — at the beginning of 2021, the self care industry was valued at $450 billion. But Guadalupe Maravilla doesn’t believe that healing comes from downloading an app or paying a shaman $1,000 to cleanse your energy. Instead, he says, real healing comes from being kind to others, helping those in need and giving back to the community — not just once in a while, but every day. Healing, for Maravilla personally, expresses itself in art.

Fleeing civil war in his native El Salvador, Maravilla arrived in the U.S., in 1984, as an unaccompanied eight-year-old. Some thirty years later, the Brooklyn-based artist was diagnosed with and survived colon cancer. He channels both of these experiences in his impressive début at the P.P.O.W. gallery’s handsome new space, in Tribeca.

Good vibrations: the artist offers up his assemblages and sound baths.

With COVID-19 vaccinations ramping up and the official start of spring just around the corner, it seems a natural time to cautiously ease back into “normal” public life or something more closely resembling it. Longer days and fairer weather also, of course, means more time spent outside with sculpture gardens, open-air art spaces, and museum grounds offering an ideal bridge between indoor gallery-going and reconnecting with the great outdoors during a season of renewal and rebirth.

Shinichi Sawada’s ceramic creatures; Sophie Larrimore and Jerry the Marble Faun’s two-person show; and Guadalupe Maravilla’s devotional paintings.

Your list of must-see, fun, insightful, and very New York art events this month.

Maravilla was part of the first wave of unaccompanied, undocumented children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. While Maravilla emigrated at the age of eight, he became a U.S. citizen at the age of 26. Yet it was not until his recovery from colon cancer in 2013 that he felt the urgency to speak out about the struggles so many undocumented immigrants and their families face.