By Alliance Intern Eleanor Hulan
There is a certain inharmonious resonance to art you see in hospitals. It doesn’t make you feel better. Some in-patient clinics will include pieces in rooms, typically generic and mass-produced. Sometimes, bed-bound, you stare at the same piece for hours and feel like parts of yourself are being lost in the process.
Guadalupe Maravilla’s art has the opposite effect. It is a rebellion against sterility and achromatism and the constraints disease and illness places upon oneself. He builds an entire nonlinear narrative from objects, natural materials and sound, and the closer you look the more you can discover.
The healing power of art and resonant sound is something I have come to believe strongly in, and Maravilla’s sculptures are the very embodiment of this ideal. The specific piece Disease Thrower #5 contains references to his struggle with colon cancer and his mother’s with breast cancer.
The Disease Thrower series as a whole features what he calls “healing machines,” and he uses this piece and others like it to heal himself and others. It is living art in every sense of the term, and I can feel the flow of life as I study #5, even through a computer screen. Maravilla says that he learned to heal himself through the creation of art, and has now turned his attention toward healing others.
The additional component to Maravilla’s work is his immigration journey. As an intersection of both his art and his mutual aid action, he hosts healing workshops for undocumented immigrants who have undergone almost unimaginable amounts of trauma. These workshops include sound baths, which he was introduced to while undergoing radiation treatment. He uses gongs, conch shells, and salvaged materials to create an atmosphere of sound enveloping a group of people seeking healing.
Maravilla came to the US in the 1980s as an unaccompanied 8 year old, an asylum seeker from the civil war in El Salvador. In an interview conducted with MoMA, Maravilla explained that “trauma and disease are interwoven” and “suggests a direct connection between his experiences as a migrant and his cancer.”
This is an often overlooked element of both physical and mental health for immigrants. A 2024 study of asylum seekers who immigrated to the US found that 94% experienced psychological stress, 47% cardiovascular disease, and 50% somatic pain. Researchers would like to conduct more analyses, but it is difficult since undocumented immigrants are less likely to seek out medical care. Especially in 2026, it is not difficult to see why.
In addition to the Disease Thrower series, I also recommend watching this short 2025 documentary with the artist, where you can hear the sounds associated with his art and watch as he retraces his immigration path, collecting materials associated with his experience as he goes.
In Maravilla’s words, “Making these elaborate Disease Throwers is not just about telling a story from my past, but it’s also about how this healing ritual can continue in the future, long after I’m gone.”