Guadalupe Maravilla · art as trauma healing

Guadalupe Maravilla · art as trauma healing

Guadalupe Maravilla — Disease Thrower 0–2022

From 8 April to 18 September 2022, the Brooklyn Museum of Art presents “Guadalupe Maravilla: Tierra Blanca Joven”, an exhibition of the work of artist and choreographer Guadalupe Maravilla.

Source: Brooklyn Art Museum. Image: Guadalupe Maravilla (El Salvador, 1976). “Disease Thrower #0”, 2022. Various materials. 299.7 × 312.4 × 162.6 cm. © Guadalupe Maravilla. Photograph by Stan Narten.

As part of Mindscapes, an international cultural programme that examines mental health in collaboration with institutions around the world, the Brooklyn Museum presents the work of Guadalupe Maravilla (formerly known as Irvin Morazan), an artist who incorporates his life experience as an illegal immigrant and cancer survivor into his work.

Eugenie Tsai, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum, says that “this is an important moment of recognition for Maravilla, the first contemporary Central American artist to present a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum. His practice speaks eloquently to the urgent need for healing felt by individuals and communities as they seek to recover a sense of physical and psychological equilibrium resulting from the trauma of a global pandemic, political upheaval, and the effects of climate change.”

In a press note, the museum explains that “Maravilla titled the exhibition Tierra Blanca Jove n to evoke an intergenerational experience of displacement from El Salvador: from the fifth century C.E., when an enormous eruption of the Tierra Blanca Joven volcano (now Lake Ilopango) forced the Maya people out of the region by depositing a thick layer of ash over the land, to the artist’s own displacement as a result of the 1979 92 civil war and that of undocumented, unaccompanied child refugees who have fled the country’s growing violence and are currently being held in detention centers in the United States”. #2022 #BrooklynMuseum #theartwolf