New York–based artist Guadalupe Maravilla had traveled to Venice last weekend to finalize the installation of his work at the 2026 Venice Biennale, a crowning achievement for any artist. But that situation, which he first posted about on Instagram, soured Thursday evening after he had left the Arsenale, one of the Biennale’s main venues, when two police officers approached him.
“After completing the installation of my work at the Venice Biennale, I was racially profiled by police in the streets of Venice, who attempted to take me in for questioning,” Maravilla told ARTnews in a written statement. “Two officers initially stopped me and demanded my documents, then called in additional backup and escalated the situation to the point of attempting to detain me. They moved to handcuff me, but I was ultimately able to de-escalate and leave.”
ARTnews has reached out to the Biennale and the Carabinieri for comment.
Maravilla is best-known for his “Disease Thrower” series, intricate sculptures meant to facilitate healing from both physical and social ills. Many of them contain gongs and singing bowls that he activates in sound baths. They have been shown at institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, among other venues. Maravilla made them as both a response to his childhood migration by foot from El Salvador to the US and to his cancer diagnosis in an adulthood, which he frames as interrelated.
Maravilla plans to show new versions of these sculptures in Venice. “The work I am presenting at the Biennale addresses the ongoing injustices faced by Latino/Latine/Latinx communities in the United States, particularly the systemic racial profiling and detention of migrants within ICE facilities,” he told ARTnews. “My sculptures function as healing instruments, honoring children who have been subjected to detention, displacement, and the long-term trauma that follows.”
He continued, “To encounter a version of that same scrutiny—on the other side of the world, immediately after installing this work—was not incidental. It underscores how these patterns of surveillance and racialized control are not confined to one nation, but are part of a broader global condition. I came to the United States as an undocumented, unaccompanied child, fleeing civil war in El Salvador, and I have spent years doing—and continuing to do—the work of healing from that experience. In the past year alone, thousands of children—and many thousands of other immigrants—have passed through ICE detention in the U.S., their lives disrupted in ways that require sustained care and long-term healing. This reality is not abstract to me; it is lived, and it informs the foundation of my practice.”
In addition to the Biennale, Maravilla’s work is currently included in a number of major group exhibitions: “Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials” at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, “Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way” at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Upstate New York, and the 2026 Diriyah Biennale in Saudi Arabia. Next week, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, will open an exhibition of his work paired with that of the late self-taught sculptor Emery Blagdon.
Beyond showing in museums and galleries, Maravilla has also focused, over the past eight years, on “community-based efforts, including mutual aid initiatives, food justice programs, organizing volunteers, and resource distribution such as coat drives. I have also contributed personal grant funding and mentored newly arrived immigrants and refugees in New York City—individuals navigating circumstances not unlike those I once faced,” he said.
Despite his most recent experience with racialized profiling and policing, on the eve of a career milestone, Maravilla said he is more committed to making his art and supporting some of the world’s most vulnerable communities. “My spiritual practice has increasingly called me to deepen this work. I believe that in the coming years, my community will require expanded forms of care and healing in response to both past and ongoing conditions in the United States,” he did. “Even this recent experience in Europe, during the installation of a major international exhibition, reinforces that these injustices are not slowing—they are proliferating across borders. In this moment, those of us working at the intersection of art, healing, and social practice are being challenged to respond with greater depth, responsibility, and commitment.”