When I Was 16 I Had the Opportunity to Go Back to El Salvador
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, NY; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Olso, Norway; and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, 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, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, Norway; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York, NY; P·P·O·W, New York, NY; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL, among others. Maravilla’s work was featured in Drums Listen to the Heart: Part III, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA in January 2023 and soft and weak like water, the 14th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea in April 2023. Guadalupe Maravilla: Mariposa Relámpago, a solo exhibition featuring a newly commissioned immersive installation at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston’s Watershed, was on view from May 25 - September 4, 2023. His work is currently on view 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, São Paulo, Brazil. La Alegría del Fuego, Maravilla’s first solo exhibition with mor charpentier, is on display in Paris through November 18, 2023.
When I Was 16 I Had the Opportunity to Go Back to El Salvador is a hybrid: it is a retablo, a type of Latin American Catholic devotional painting that takes inspiration from Indigenous Maya Culture, particularly rock stelae in Honduras and the lushly vegetated ruins of pyramids that served as the artist’s playgrounds during his childhood in El Salvador. It depicts a family trip and their ascent to the summit of the Santa Ana Volcano, commemorating Guadalupe Maravilla’s first return to his homeland after escaping the Salvadoran Civil War and walking alone to reach the US. He explains, "The civil war had just ended and I was there to start my refugee paperwork that led to my green card and eventually a US citizenship. We took a family trip to a national park which is located next to the Volcán de Santa Ana o Ilamatepec. My best friend and I decided to climb the volcano without telling anyone. We bought water in clear plastic bags and we tied them to our belts. We were teens and had no idea what we were doing, we just went upward and several hours later we reached the summit. To our surprise the inside of the crater had a turquoise milky pond and its steam smelled of sulfur. The first person we encountered at the summit was not a local or an ancestor from a volcano myth, but a German tourist. There we reminisced about how as children we dreamt of climbing the volcanoes and seeing all the different types of craters. Over the years we had heard that roses were grown in the inside of the crater and alligators swam in the sulfur water.
While grounded in his personal experiences, Guadalupe Maravilla's retablos, along with his stalactite-like sculptures and other works, convey global themes, including disease, war, migration, and loss. The artwork encapsulates not only themes of memory, journey, transformation, and healing in the context of the artist's unique life but also serves as a poignant reminder of the resilience and renewal that can emerge from personal and collective experiences of conflict and displacement.
The Blackwood
University of Toronto Mississauga
3359 Mississauga Road
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
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The Blackwood is situated on the Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Seneca, and Huron-Wendat.