Hunter College alum Guadalupe Maravilla MFA ’14 has been awarded the prestigious 2025 Vilcek Prize in Visual Arts.
The Vilcek Prizes are awarded to immigrants with a legacy of major accomplishment in the biomedical sciences and the arts and humanities, including, literature, culinary arts, music, filmmaking, architecture, dance, design, fashion, theatre, and visual arts. The prize includes a $100,000 cash award. Jamaican-born Hunter Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History Nari Ward was awarded a Vilcek Prize in 2017.
Born in El Salvador, Maravilla came to the United States in the 1980s as an eight-year-old undocumented and unaccompanied child fleeing from civil war. He was diagnosed at age 36 with stage 3 colon cancer. Those experiences have become a focus of his art.
“A lot of my work is about my story,” Maravilla said. “So, my work is really about expressing how one can overcome challenges and heal from them.”
Maravilla became a U.S. citizen in 2016. He returned to Hunter in 2022 as a Zabar Visiting Artist.
From left: Judy Zabar ’54, Stanley Zabar, Guadalupe Maravilla MFA ’14, and Art & Art History Professor Howard Singerman in 2022.
A transdisciplinary visual artist, choreographer, and healer, Maravilla combines pre-colonial Central American iconography, personal mythology, and collaborative acts in his art. His performances, objects, and drawings trace the history of his and others’ displacements. Maravilla also explores how systemic abuse of immigrants manifests itself in their bodies, reflecting on his own battle with cancer. His large-scale sculptures, titled “Disease Throwers,” function as headdresses, instruments, and shrines. They incorporate materials from across Central America, anatomical models, and sonic instruments such as conch shells and gongs.
About Hunter’s MFA in Studio Art
The MFA Program in Studio Art is a three-year program that offers advanced studies in Visual Art. Working with faculty from ceramics, drawing, sculpture, new genres, painting, printmaking, and photography, students learn to develop innovative, politically and socially engaged expression using diverse media. The MFA in Studio Art offers a 48-credit course of study, combining interdisciplinary seminars, one-on-one tutorials, classes on special topics, and art history courses spanning diverse histories. The MFA in Studio Art gives access to visiting curators, visiting artist workshops, curatorial studies, lectures, and an interdisciplinary program of graduate-initiated activities and access to courses in any other CUNY school. MFA students explore new ways to advance the field of visual arts and ideas, balancing critical thinking with aesthetics, contemporary issues within an historical perspective, theory with practice, and traditional methods with recent technologies.
