The Healing Art of Harmonic Vibrations

In 2019, archeologists published findings that the sculptors of Monte Alto, a pre-Mayan civilization in Central America, made the navels and cheeks of their massive figures out of magnetized stone. The purpose of this, one theory suggests, was to personify the human life force. The magnificent steel-and-cast-aluminum “Disease Thrower” series by the New York-based artist Guadalupe Maravilla—towering sculptures on view at Socrates Sculpture Park through Labor Day—is informed by a similar principle: the sculptures incorporate gongs, which the forty-four-year-old artist plays in his capacity as a vibrational healer, transforming works of art into therapeutic instruments. Long before social-media platforms were awash in vibes and sound baths became a Goop-sanctioned way to unwind, the ancient mystics of Mesoamerica (also of Egypt, Greece, and the Himalayas) were attuned to the medicinal power of harmonic vibrations.

Maravilla, who is of Mayan and mestizo heritage, was born in El Salvador and arrived in the United States, in 1984, at the age of eight, as an unaccompanied minor fleeing civil war. (The trauma of the immigrant experience is one of the abiding subjects of his art.) He attended art school in New York City, earning a B.A. from the School of Visual Arts, in 2003, and an M.F.A. from Hunter College, a decade later. He went on to study with one of America’s leading gong masters, the octogenarian Don Conreaux. The circumstance under which the student found his teacher is, like other aspects of Maravilla’s biography, remarkable.

About eight years ago, the artist was diagnosed with colon cancer and underwent a debilitating course of radiation. A friend suggested that he might find relief through alternative therapy. As Maravilla later described the experience of his first sound-healing session, “Don played in front of me while I was laying on the ground. When I arrived, I could barely walk because I was in so much pain. After the sound bath, I was able to get up on my own and get on the subway and go home. So that day I knew, if I were to overcome cancer, I would want to learn to play these instruments.” The radiation was successful, and the artist began training with Conreaux and using gongs as a primary material in his shamanic sculptures, which he refers to as “healing machines.” To mark his metamorphosis, he shed the name he was given at birth, Irvin Morazan, and assumed a new identity, combining his birthday, December 12th, the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, with Maravilla, part of the alias that his father, an undocumented immigrant, uses in the U.S.

Maravilla’s installation at Socrates, on the waterfront in Long Island City, also honors his ancestors. Its expansive title is “Planeta Abuelx,” which translates as “Planet Grandparent.” (The “x” riffs on both the word “Latinx” and on ideas of gender neutrality.) The centerpiece is a new pair of “Disease Thrower” sculptures, the artist’s largest to date (one of the gongs is sounded by ascending a ladder), and the first to be made out of metal. Previously, as seen earlier this year in Maravilla’s superb exhibition “Seven Ancestral Stomachs,” at the P.P.O.W. gallery, the primary elements of these sculptures (gongs aside) were vegetal: loofahs, corn husks, and reeds, which the artist sourced on trips to Central America. The resulting totemic freestanding assemblages—taller than most human beings—could be partly dismantled and worn as headdresses. There is also a vegetable element to the Socrates installation: a sixty-foot-wide garden, encircling the “Disease Thrower” sculptures, in which medicinal plants and beans, corn, and squash—the “three sisters,” staples of many indigenous diets in the Americas—are being grown.

Maravilla’s art is in conversation with his art-world ancestry, as well as his Mayan/mestizo one. The medium of sound art is more than a century old, dating back to the Futurists. The Swedish abstract painter Hilma af Klint believed that her paintings were portals to higher spiritual realms. (Obscure in her lifetime, af Klint now rivals Sally Rooney as a millennial talisman.) Formally, the “Disease Throwers” at Socrates would make energetic companions for the work of the park’s founder, Mark di Suvero, another conscientious political artist, who upcycles scrap metal into remarkable monuments. In the nineteen-seventies, the Brazilian modernist Lygia Clark came to believe that art could have curative power, and she began using her objects in healing sessions with clients; unlike Maravilla, she felt compelled to abandon her career as an artist to do so.

In the late nineteen-nineties, the theory of “relational aesthetics” dominated the global art circuit—never mind that every work of art already exists in relation to the world around it. Serving meals, hosting sleepovers, and setting off fireworks became new art forms. Yet, however earnest the artists’ intentions were, their work often felt diminished by its insularity—novelty acts entertaining a captive audience as it bounced between the art-fair Basels in Miami and Switzerland. But, more recently, conceptually minded activists, from Theaster Gates to Tania Bruguera, have undertaken projects that directly benefit communities that galleries and museums rarely serve. An openness to New Age alchemies is on the rise, too: the photographer Deana Lawson has placed crystals at strategic locations in her current show at the Guggenheim.

As Maravilla’s star has ascended in art circles—MOMA acquired “Disease Thrower #5,” in 2019—his commitment to sharing his gift beyond those circles has only deepened. Throughout the pandemic, he has been providing sound baths for undocumented immigrants at a Brooklyn church. (Art 21 filmed one of the events for the fine short documentary “Guadalupe Maravilla and the Sound of Healing.”) His last healing session at Socrates is in the late afternoon on September 4th. (The rain date is September 5th; the event is free, but registration is required via socratessculpturepark.org.)