Salvadoran Embroideries Featured in Guadalupe Maravilla’s “Les Soñadores” Exhibition in Los Angeles

As part of the exhibition “Les Soñadores” [The Dreamers], the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen [Museum of the Word and Image, MUPI] is presenting a selection of embroideries made by women from Las Vueltas, Chalatenango. The exhibition opened last Saturday, September 13, at REDCAT gallery, located in Downtown Los Angeles, California, United States.

The exhibition’s curator, Daniela Lieja Quintanar, stated: “For us as an institution, and for the artist Guadalupe Maravilla, it is an honor to be able to show these valued objects of art and resistance at REDCAT. They will engage with migrant communities in California, alongside the work of Salvadoran artist Guadalupe Maravilla, who captures stories through retablos, sculptures, video, and music.”

Guadalupe Maravilla’s work focuses on his experience of migration from El Salvador to the United States. At the age of seven, he fled the civil war alone, without family members, on a journey marked by uprooting. Later, he survived colon cancer, an illness he himself relates to the trauma of forced displacement, migration, and his life as an undocumented person in the United States.

For both the artist and the curator, the inclusion of MUPI’s embroideries means giving voice to those who remained in El Salvador facing violence, while also weaving everyday resistance. It is also a way to make visible a history that is rarely told in the United States, although it is deeply known by the Salvadoran diaspora.

The exhibition “Les Soñadores” will remain open to the public from September 13 to December 19, 2025, at REDCAT gallery in Los Angeles, located at 631 W 2nd St, Los Angeles, CA 90012.

Link note [in Spanish]: https://museo.com.sv/.../el-mupi-participa-en-exposicion.../

The Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador research initiative is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Western University, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and the Ontario Research Fund.