In his Brooklyn studio, the El Salvador-born artist Guadalupe Maravilla got ready to activate “Disease Thrower #0,” the latest in his acclaimed series of sculptures that deploy the powers of vibrational sound as a form of healing.The writer, who is recovering from a rare cancer, took her place on an elevated woven straw platform, her stockinged feet facing a formidable metal gong. She relaxed into the artist’s ritual space — part sculpture, part shrine. It was draped with a mysterious material blackened with ash from healing ceremonies that Maravilla, who is a cancer survivor himself, performed for hundreds of fellow warriors last summer in Queens.The sounds built slowly, starting with low monk-like tones before morphing into mighty guttural roars that she could feel entering her body from behind her cheekbones. “We want to say ‘thank you’ to those body parts that have struggled,” the artist told me as I lay still on the platform. “Thank them for healing and persevering through difficult times.”If adversity is a teacher, Maravilla has studied with the master. At only 8 years old he fled the violence of the civil war in El Salvador alone and began a punishing 3,000 mile, 2½ month journey to the U.S.-Mexico border, passed from coyote to coyote before eventually crossing the border as an undocumented immigrant. Twenty-eight years later, while a graduate student at Hunter College, Maravilla was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. To reduce the residual pain from radiation and other procedures, he turned to Indigenous healing practices, some inherited from his Maya ancestors. Chief among them were “sound baths” that harness sonic vibrations from gongs, conch shells, tuning forks and other instruments to restore calm and balance and release toxins in the body.“Disease Thrower #0,” one of Guadalupe Maravilla’s sculptures in his solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.Guadalupe Maravilla and P·P·O·W; Stan Narten“Disease Thrower #0” (2022) is one of 10 works in “Guadalupe Maravilla: Tierra Blanca Joven,” a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum opening April 8 (through Sept. 18). The title refers to a fifth-century volcanic eruption that uprooted the Maya — a shorthand by the artist for three generations of displacement, including his own. The earliest, the cultural appropriation of artifacts, is represented by whistles, conch shells and other Maya objects he selected for display from the museum’s permanent collection. The most current example features the undocumented Central American teens who are in detention in upstate New York, captured in a video with the artist in which they collectively act out details of daily life in confinement.The artist’s pieces are also on view through Oct. 30 in “Guadalupe Maravilla: Luz y Fuerza” at the Museum of Modern Art — the Spanish title translates as “hope and strength.” Healing sound baths for visitors are offered there through June. An exhibition called “Sound Botánica” recently opened in Norway at the Henie Onstad Art Center.The notion of healing and rebirth permeates Maravilla’s work and the seemingly wacky array of items in his studio — a plastic mosquito, several toy snakes, a large metal fly, an anatomical model of human lungs, a bunch of dehydrated tortillas (the artist paints them) and a shelf full of bottled Florida water used for blessings, to name a few. A dried manta ray hangs heroically above the entrance — a nod to the sea creature that prevented him from drowning as a boy by leaping through the waves to reveal his location to his parents.Objects embedded in works like “Disease Thrower #0” — loofah sponges and a woven hammock offering respite for ancestors, for instance — are pages in a complex narrative in which past traumas, if properly treated, can lead to spiritual and creative renewal.Works from “Luz y Fuerza” at the Museum of Modern Art.David AlmeidaMaravilla’s otherworldly aesthetic, which also informs a series of Latin American devotional paintings known as retablos, is loosely inspired by Indigenous Maya culture, especially Honduran rock stelae and ruins of pyramids engulfed with vegetation that were his Salvadorean playgrounds as a child. “It was layer after layer after layer,” he recalled of those ancient forms. “The whole world was there.”Although frequently autobiographical, the artist’s stalactite-like sculptures and other works speak to the global themes of disease, war, migration and loss. “Migrating birds riding the back of a celestial serpent” (2021), a large wall piece at MoMA, for instance, incorporates a child’s stroller wheel and Crocs into a sinuous ribbon of wings and dried maguey leaves, a reference to children crossing the border.“Between the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, everyone is feeling psychologically battered and vulnerable and fearful,” said Eugenie Tsai, a senior curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, where the exhibition is part of Mindscapes, an international cultural mental health initiative. “Guadalupe’s practice speaks to all those things.”His cancer diagnosis, which occurred on his 36th birthday, catalyzed a shift in his approach and prompted him to retrace the migratory route he traveled as a frightened boy. He now undertakes these pilgrimages regularly, picking up objects “with the right energy” for his sculptures along the way. Maravilla views his bout with cancer as a blessing. “I was always invested in learning about ancient ways of healing,” he said. “But before the illness I didn’t know how to do it.” At right in his studio in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is “When I Was 16 I Had The Opportunity To Go Back To El Salvador Retablo,” from 2022.Wayne Lawrence for The New York TimesHis birth name is Irvin Morazan. In 1980, his father fled El Salvador after seeing the beheaded body of his brother — the artist’s uncle — hanging from a tree, and identifying him by a shirt he had borrowed. Two years later young Irvin’s mother followed, leaving him with relatives.Several years later Irvin began his own perilous journey north. He carried a small notebook, often playing “tripa chuca” (“dirty guts”) en route, a Salvadorean children’s line drawing game for two he compares to “a fingerprint between two people.” It has since become a signature element in his exhibitions.In Tijuana, he spent two weeks in a hotel room taking care of dozens of even younger children before being woken up at 3 a.m. by a coyote reeking of alcohol. The man put him in the back of a pickup truck along with a fluffy white dog that lay on top of him to conceal him from border agents — much like the white cadejo, a folkloric character that protects travelers from harm. (Irvin gained his citizenship in 2006.)His birthday, Dec. 12, coincides with the auspicious Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, celebrating the mother of Jesus. His own mother, who died of cancer in 2007, revealed during her illness that she had wanted to name her baby son Guadalupe, but her husband vetoed the name in favor of a more masculine one. In 2016, to commemorate his second chance at life post-cancer, the artist changed his name, choosing Maravilla, which means “marvel” or “wonder” in Spanish, to honor the fake identity purchased by his undocumented father.Maravilla attributes the cancers and other illnesses in his family to the generational traumas of war, migration, family separation and the stresses of being undocumented. In 1987, his mother was deported to El Salvador for two years after an immigration raid at the New Jersey factory where she worked. It took a huge toll on her health, the artist said.Installation view, “Guadalupe Maravilla: Tierra Blanca Joven,” at the Brooklyn Museum. Center, “Disease Thrower #18,” 2021.Danny PerezNevertheless, he views his own cancer as a blessing, transforming his practice from more performative works to creating spiritually powerful sculptures designed to heal. “I was always invested in learning about ancient ways of healing,” Maravilla said. “But before the illness I didn’t know how to do it.” In his retablos — a collaboration with Daniel Vilchis, a fourth-generation Mexico City retablo painter — he expresses gratitude to the radiation machine that killed his tumor, to the gourds that nourished him, to the plant medicines that, with the help of a shaman, helped him identify that there was an issue in his gut.The name “Disease Thrower” is meant to evoke the ferocity and power of an Indigenous god (even though it technically is made from glue and fibers cooked in a microwave). Some of these thronelike sculptures refer to cancer with plastic anatomical models of breasts, colons and other body parts. Some are embedded with zodiacal crabs.Maravilla has largely focused his therapeutic sound baths on people recovering from cancer and the undocumented community, where large numbers of workers lost their jobs during the pandemic. “I have 35 years of experience ahead of them,” he said of crossing the border. “I know what can happen when trauma goes untreated.’’He is chagrined that healing has become a commodity and is committed to offering his practices for free.In “Planeta Abuelx” at Socrates Sculpture Park last summer, he created an outdoor sound bath environment anchored by two Gaudí-scaled metal sculptures crowned by a massive gong. The installation was encircled by a medicinal garden the artist had planted: He also hired a fire keeper to make sure that “whatever people were releasing” — more than 1,500 participated over four months — was consumed by flames. Reviewing for The New York Times, the critic Martha Schwendener wrote that “the project is one of the best Socrates has presented in recent years.”“I’m not going to heal anyone with a magic wand,” Maravilla, shown here at the Museum of Modern Art, said of his own approach. “I believe we are our own medicine.”Julieta CervantesThe artist’s goal is to create a permanent healing center in Brooklyn staffed by artists, sound therapists and other practitioners. “I’m not going to heal anyone with a magic wand,” he said of his approach. “I believe we are our own medicine.”On Saturdays at the height of the pandemic, he performed sound baths for undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers at The Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where the pastor, Juan Carlos Ruiz, had been undocumented his first eight years in the United States. At first, the rituals took place on the hard stone floors of the sanctuary.But when the event moved to the Fellowship Hall next door, with its wood-plank floors, the vibrations deepened and the floors became “a huge wooden bed,” the pastor said. Some members of the community had not slept well in months. “You could hear a chorus of snoring at the end of the session,” he said.Aristotoles Joseph Sanchez, a father of three, spent 19 months in a detention center in Georgia, an ordeal that has inspired three Maravilla retablos.Sanchez has been plagued by various physical ailments, including diabetes, and was a bit mystified at first by the presence of “a bohemian.” But as Maravilla shared his story and explained his purpose, Sanchez said he knew that good things were going to happen.He emerged more pain-free. “It’s the intention and the intensity,” he said. “You heal as long as you believe.”

Women who went to prison for killing their abusive partners are starting over at Home Free, an apartment complex created by design volunteers in San Francisco.Nestled on her Chesterfield sofa, her electric wheelchair close at hand, Rosemary Dyer surveyed the glittering peacock figurines she had snapped up on her first solo trip to San Francisco’s Chinatown after leaving prison, and admired the bright tablecloth with silk flowers in her new living room.Dyer, an effervescent woman with a mischievous sense of humor, brought these and other prized possessions to Home Free, a new complex of transitional apartments in San Francisco. It was designed for women who have been imprisoned for killing her abusive partner or being at the scene of a crime under the coercion of an abusive spouse or boyfriend. Dyer was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole in 1988 for the 1985 shooting death of her husband of eight years, who had abused and tortured her, in an era when evidence of domestic violence was not allowed in court in California.The insidious viciousness that defined her life included being repeatedly beaten, and sodomized with a loaded handgun. Her husband had dug a grave in the backyard, saying he intended to bury her alive.The interior design for the apartments on Treasure Island, the former home of a naval base, was the work of students at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and other volunteers. Retailers donated furniture and linens to the renovated units.Talia Herman for The New York TimesIn an apartment ready for re-entry, paintings were donated by students of the Academy of Art University.Talia Herman for The New York TimesHome Free — where Dyer’s 2020 commutation from Gov. Gavin Newsom hangs proudly on the wall — was created by Five Keys Schools and Programs, a statewide nonprofit that provides education, vocational training, therapeutic programs and housing for incarcerated people and the newly released. The complex of five two-bedroom apartments is the result of years of advocacy by survivors of intimate-partner violence, and organizations working with them. Their efforts allowed women like Dyer to achieve release through clemency or by retroactively introducing evidence of their abuse to the state parole board or the courts.“That women who had unspeakable violence committed against them were not allowed to bring in evidence of the abuse is the quintessential injustice,” said Sunny Schwartz, the founder of Five Keys. “We were committed to making a vibrant, dignified and safe home, a place that says ‘you’re worthy.’ ”Previous transitional housing options for women were largely limited to those treating addiction. Home Free, on Treasure Island, a former Naval base in San Francisco Bay, was forged during the pandemic last year on a tight start-up budget of $750,000, including staff. The formerly grimy apartments were renovated with the help of nearly 100 volunteers — architects and landscape architects, flooring and cabinetry installers, plumbers, haulers, electricians and city construction apprentices. They all gathered on this somewhat bizarre island originally built for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exhibition.The landscaping is largely in the form of container gardens of flowers and trees because the land is tainted by chemicals. Mithun, a design firm, help get the trees donated.Talia Herman for The New York TimesInterior design students from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco devoted a semester to the project, joining mini-charettes on Zoom with Irving A. Gonzales of G7 Architects. They also brainstormed with the women, whose desires included full-length mirrors (they had been deprived in prison of eyeballing their shape for years).“We wanted color!” said Dyer, who visited the construction site while she was still in temporary housing. She and others had a particular aversion to gray, a shade associated with metal prison bunks and lockers.A 69-year-old cancer survivor with congestive heart failure, Dyer has used a wheelchair since she injured her hip in prison. A huge pirate flag — a nod to the Treasure Island theme — greets visitors upon arrival. Her accessible apartment adjoins a patio where she grows pots of tomatoes and radishes.The landscape itself was designed by Hyunch Sung, of the firm Mithun, who chose 10 different tree species. (Because Treasure Island’s soil is tainted by industrial chemicals, the trees are planted in brightly-painted containers.) Sung said she approached her work there as if she were designing for high-end clients. “The idea of beauty is underplayed for disadvantaged communities,” she said.Nilda Palacios, 38, who lives upstairs, said it was “emotionally moving” to join the complex. She grew up with a history of abuse: She was molested as a child by an uncle and stepfather and then raped as a 15-year-old by a high school teacher. The stressful trial of the teacher led her to rely on drugs and alcohol (“I was trying to sleep my life away,” she said). Palacios became distraught and suicidal. When a panhandler cornered her one day, she said, she thought he intended to attack her and “lashed out,” strangling him. She was convicted of second-degree murder. Incarcerated for 17 years, she benefited from therapists in prison who helped her understand “how the depth of my crime was related to my history,” she said. “I confused someone who wasn’t a threat with someone who was.”Nilda Palacios, 38, with her dog, Milo, in their Home Free apartment. Therapists helped her understand the relationship between her own traumas and the violent act that led to her imprisonment for 17 years.Talia Herman for The New York TimesPalacios was released on parole. She has benefited from a more expansive vision for Home Free, which now welcome women like her, whose crimes were linked directly to their abuse.Moving in, she was “shocked” at the prospect of a private bedroom after years of sharing an 8-x-10-foot cell and cramming all her belongings into a six-cubic-foot box, with, as a current inmate puts it, “your panties right against the noodles and peanut butter.”“No way, this is my room?” Palacios recalled. “It felt to me like a real home.”A Path to Humane HousingThe idea for Home Free was born during a conversation between Schwartz, its founder, and the California State Treasurer Fiona Ma, then a state assemblywoman. Ma’s legislation, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2012, allowed women who had suffered domestic abuse and been convicted of violent felonies related to their abuse the opportunity to have their cases reheard using Battered Women’s Syndrome (as it was then called) as a defense. The legislation also gave them the right to present evidence of abuse by intimate partners during the parole process. It applied to those convicted before August 1996.From left, Tammy Cooper Garvin, residential coordinator of Home Free, and Sunny Schwartz, the founder of Five Keys Home Free, the group behind the project.Talia Herman for The New York TimesThe number of Rosemary Dyers still behind bars is unknown. About 12,000 women are currently incarcerated for homicide offenses nationally, said Debbie Mukamal, the executive director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center at Stanford Law School and the director of the Regilla Project, a three-year effort to study the frequency with which women in the United States are imprisoned for killing their abusers. Small studies, including one in Canada, suggest that 65% of women serving a life sentence for murdering their intimate partners had been abused by them before the offense. The link between abuse and violent crime was underscored by grim statistics in a 1999 U.S. Department of Justice report showing that a quarter to a third of incarcerated women had been abused as juveniles and a quarter to almost half as adults.Despite increased public awareness, “there are still a vast number of criminal attorneys who don’t understand how intimate-partner violence creates the context for a crime,” said Leigh Goodmark, director of the gender violence clinic at the University of Maryland School of Law.In New York State, the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act, enacted in 2019, was put to the test in the much-publicized case of Nicole Addimando, a young mother of two in Poughkeepsie who fatally her live-in boyfriend and father of her children in 2017 after years of harrowing abuse (the case is dramatically captured in the documentary film “And So I Stayed.”)Cooper Garvin (left) and Schwartz (right), outside the apartment building on Treasure Island, renovated naval housing.Talia Herman for The New York TimesSentenced to 19 years to life for second-degree murder, Addimando was entitled to a subsequent hearing under the Act, where her claims of abuse might be factored into a reduced sentence. The county court judge rejected those claims, believing she “had the opportunity to safely leave her abuser.” In July, the state Supreme Court’s Appellate Division reversed that decision, reducing Ms. Addimando’s time behind bars to 7 ½ years.To Kate Mogulescu, an associate professor at Brooklyn Law School and director of its Survivors Justice Project, the case illustrates “the impossible burdens we put on survivors to prove their victimization.” Women are scrutinized in court in ways that are very different from men, she added. “With women, they’re a bad mother, or promiscuous. Tropes get trotted out on women and the punishments reflect that.” Nevertheless, so far, 16 women have been resentenced in New York.By far the most common reason women who have been abused by intimate partners wind up in prison is the so-called accomplice laws, in which a victim is coerced into being at the scene of an abuser’s violence, such as driving the getaway car, said Colby Lenz, a co-founder of Survived and Punished, a national advocacy organization.That was the case with Tammy Cooper Garvin, who was sex trafficked at age 14 and was imprisoned for 28 years for being in the car while her pimp murdered a client. Her sentence was commuted and she was hired by Home Free as its residential coordinator.Rosemary Dryer, 69, outside her  apartment in the garden she calls “Freedom Forest” provided by Five Keys Home Free.Talia Herman for The New York TimesAnother advocate — and a guiding force behind the founding of Home Free — is a fellow survivor named Brenda Clubine, who started a weekly support group at the California Institution for Women. Some 72 women soon joined. Dyer was one of the original members, though until Clubine encouraged her, she was so terrified of life that she could hardly speak.Clubine herself had sustained years of abuse, including fractures and stab wounds, by her husband, a former police detective She hit his head with a wine bottle and he died of blunt force trauma. She served 26 years of a 16-to-life sentence. Her fierce retelling of the stories of the women in the prison group — which she sent to state legislators and governors — led to public hearings and the 2009 documentary “Sin by Silence,” which in turn inspired the California laws.Clubine’s close friendship with Dyer has continued and is pivotal to Dyer’s rebounding confidence. At Home Free, Dyer now revels in making homemade noodles with chicken from her grandmother’s recipe. Clubine, her BFF, observed that a safe and fortifying place for her “sisters” has been a long time coming. “I can’t say how full my heart feels that it’s available to them now,” she said.