Guadalupe Maravilla grounds his sculpture, painting, performance, and large-scale installation in activism and healing, informed by his personal story of migration, illness, and recovery. Through powerful and symbolic objects and images Maravilla collects while retracing his own migration route from El Salvador to the United States, his work mixes Latin American and indigenous crafts, medicinal materials and plants, and readymade goods.

Mariposa Relámpago Retablo recounts the creation of the artist’s largest sculpture to date, Mariposa Relámpago, commissioned by ICA/Boston for the ICA Watershed in 2023 and currently touring the United States. Building on the tradition of retablos—devotional paintings often placed in a church, chapel, or one’s home—Maravilla began his Retablo series in 2019 after a trip to Mexico retracing his own migration route. During the trip, he met traditional retablo painters (retableros) Daniel Alonso Vilchis Hernandez and his father Alfredo Vilchis Roque. Maravilla began an ongoing collaboration with the painters in which he creates a digital sketch and writes the accompanying text, and then Daniel and his father paint them in oil on tin. In Mariposa Relámpago Retablo, he adapts this folk art form to chronicle his own life story and express gratitude for notable events. Maravilla depicts the creation of the monumental work Mariposa Relámpago, which began as a school bus in the United States, had a second life transporting workers in El Salvador and Mexico, and was transformed by Maravilla into a sculpture and musical instrument for vibrational therapy. He depicts details such as the gongs and enormous feather serpent that adorn the bus and significant moments from this process, including sound ceremonies performed by healers in El Salvador. Around the painting, Maravilla constructs a sculptural frame and embeds objects he has collected that relate to broader themes in the artist’s practice, including a copper bird representing freedom and squash-shaped coin purses referencing one of the foods that Maravilla ate following his chemotherapy treatments.