REDCAT Presents Guadalupe Maravilla: Les soñadores Exhibition: Sept. 13 - Dec. 19, 2025
September 10, 2025
LOS ANGELES — Opening Sept. 13 and running through Dec. 19, 2025, Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT) presents Les soñadores, Guadalupe Maravilla’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.
For Les soñadores, Guadalupe Maravilla transforms REDCAT into an environment for healing and storytelling. Born in El Salvador, Maravilla fled the country at the age of eight as an unaccompanied minor to escape the violence of the 12-year Salvadoran Civil War, reuniting with his family in the United States. As an adult, the artist survived cancer, a disease he believes resulted from the traumas of war, migration, exile, and formerly living in the US undocumented. The works in the exhibition retrace Maravilla’s own journey, from an unaccompanied child crossing the border to the present, connecting it with the journeys of others to offer a site for ancestral healing and collective care.
The exhibition features work in a variety of media. The large-scale sculpture Migratory Birds Riding the Celestial Serpent (2021) is made of maguey leaves and objects collected from the artist's original migration route. Maravilla presents for the first time a medicinal shrine from his home, along with a series of painted volcanic rock sculptures made in collaboration with artists in Mexico. The walls and columns of the gallery become a canvas for a large drawing based on the Salvadoran children’s drawing game Tripa Chuca, which Maravilla will create by playing it with LA-based migrant community members. The film Mariposa Relámpago (2024) documents one of the artist’s most ambitious projects, retracing his migratory route through a bus that transforms into a vehicle of healing. The exhibition also features a selection of embroideries created by Salvadoran refugees documenting their memories of the Civil War on loan from the Museo de la Palabra y Imagen (MUPI) in San Salvador. The embroideries engage in a direct dialogue with Maravilla’s works in utilizing the connective and healing power of storytelling. These works in the exhibition are connected by Mariposa Relámpago Ceremony (2023) recorded live sound bath playing throughout the gallery, composed by Maravilla and his sound healer collaborators.
On September 13 at 6 pm, Guadalupe Maravilla will be in conversation with Steven Lam, dean, CalArts School Art, and Daniela Lieja Quintanar, chief curator and deputy director, Programs, REDCAT. The artist talk includes a screening of the Art21 film Guadalupe Maravilla’s “Mariposa Relámpago.”
Guadalupe Maravilla: Les soñadores is funded in part with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation. Upcoming programming is funded through the generous support of the Mike Kelley Foundation.The exhibition is curated by Daniela Lieja Quintanar, chief curator and deputy director, Programs.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Combining sculpture, painting, performative acts, and installation, Guadalupe Maravilla grounds his transdisciplinary practice in activism and healing. Engaging a wide variety of visual cultures, Maravilla’s work is autobiographical, referencing his unaccompanied migration to the United States due to the Salvadoran Civil War. Across all media, Maravilla explores how the systemic abuse of immigrants physically manifests in the body, reflecting on his own battle with cancer. 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; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, among others. He has received numerous awards and fellowships including a Herb Alpert Award in 2022, Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2019, Soros Fellowship: Art Migration and Public Space in 2019, Creative Capital Grant in 2016, and The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation Award in 2003. He has presented solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; P·P·O·W, New York; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, among others. His work has been included in recent group exhibitions such as uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things, Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, UK; soft and weak like water, 14th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju Metropolitan City, South Korea; Drum Listens to Heart, Part III, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San FranciscoA; Crip Time, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; and Stories of Resistance, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, among others.
INFORMATION
Guadalupe Maravilla
Les soñadores
Sept. 13 - Dec. 19, 2025
Admission is FREE
Gallery Hours: Wednesday to Sunday, 12 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Learn more: https://www.redcat.org/events/2025/guadalupe-maravilla-1
Curator-led Walkthrough
Saturday, October 25, 2025
Event is FREE, RSVP recommended Walkthrough starts at 12 p.m.