9.14.22 — Disease Throwers and Throw Pillows
Guadalupe Maravilla grew up in the aftermath of earth-shattering events, and then he went through a few of his own. An exhibition at follows him into both, at the Brooklyn Museum through September 18, but with a heavy dose of pop psychology that might embarrass almost anyone.
As a child he took Mayan pyramids as a playground, with the volcano that disrupted Mayan civilization in the fifth century not just ancient history. Its eruptions continued until the 1960s, earning it the nickname of Lighthouse to the World. Now it supplies the title to his exhibition, “Tierra Blanca Joven.” Can it still hold out the promise of young white earth?
Today the site of a lake, it suggests the prospects of renewal for a war-ravaged nation and an artist at risk of death. Together with past reports on David Alekhuogie and Remy Jungerman, who encompass deep cultural and personal histories themselves, it is the subject of a longer review in my latest upload.
Maravilla did not need an active volcano to shatter his childhood. Born in 1986, he never knew El Salvador without civil war, and right-wing death squads made him an illegal exile in New York at age eight. (He mapped his movements for “Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay” at the Whitney in 2018.) Against the odds, he managed a green card, citizenship, and an arts education at Hunter College, when something shattered his adult life as well. Cancer struck, and he sought out whatever treatment he could—in modern medicine, ancient arts, and his own. He calls his sculpture Disease Throwers, leaving open whether it spreads death or gathers it in order to throw it away.
An artist in need of healing, he brought a herbal garden, a gong, and a purifying fire to Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens in 2021. That show had the theme of “Monuments Now,” but is his sculpture monumental? The child who clambered over pyramids must know the limits of the monumental. If anything, his work looks like scraps of a life best forgotten, with a sticky, grotty overgrowth that anyone would fear to touch. Yet it aspires to something regal. Maravilla opens with what might be royalty or the throne itself, and he tosses in a king- or queen-sized bed.
After the throne’s resinous white and the bed’s sinister black, color comes as a relief. Maravilla collaborates with a maker of retablos, the devotional paintings of Latin American art. (Historians still refer to Renaissance altarpieces as retables, from the French.) He himself supplies the imagery, which unfolds against a backdrop of that volcano. As it recedes into the distance, its slopes start to resemble a two-lane highway to nowhere. The actors, though, are fanciful and fun.
Text across the bottom of each painting fills in the background, including a troubled visit to his homeland as an adult. Paired with the images, it also brings them both closer to a comic book than to Christian dogma. The museum’s supporting pillars bear still more cartoonish gestures. All is dangerous and all is in fun. It is also filled with music, linking the work that much more to folk tradition—like music on video set into the sculpture. Gilded circles occupy the head of the thrones, like halos behind an enthroned god, but they are gongs as well.
Will they ring out? Maravilla sure hopes so, but neither he nor the curator, Eugenie Tsai, will settle for earthly music. After all, who knows how much time he has left on earth? More to the point, the museum takes all too seriously his claims to transcendence and folk healing. The modest exhibition belongs to a series, “Mindscapes,” on the theme of mental health, with other installments in Los Angeles, Berlin, and Japan. It does not, though, seem to take its subject in the least seriously. Off it goes to physical illness, political threats, ancestral cultures, and spiritualism.
It is also irresponsible. Mental illness is real and not an artifact of cultural hegemony, colonialism, or anything else. It is just as irresponsible to delegate an advanced stage of cancer to shamans—or to talk of civil war without mentioning that Ronald Reagan backed the death squads. An artist who can make such bright objects look dangerous has to know better. A “healing room” behind the exhibition offers “teen zines,” throw pillows, and a book in which to leave your message. Take your time, but return on your way out to the art.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.




