As part of the opening weekend of Pedro Reyes: DIRECT ACTION, artist Pedro Reyes discusses the power of transforming formerly deadly materials into art with Miranda Viscoli, co-president of New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence and co-founder of Guns to Gardens, a gun buyback program in New Mexico.

About the Presenters

Miranda Viscoli

Miranda Viscoli received a Bachelor of Fine Arts at New York University as well as a Bachelor of Arts from California State University at Long Beach. In the summer of 2009, she completed her masters in Latin American art history at California State University Long Beach where her master’s thesis won the Outstanding Thesis Award for the College of the Arts. After the Sandy Hook shooting, Miranda Viscoli suspended work on her PhD at the University of New Mexico in order to research and write about the problem of gun violence both in New Mexico and the United States. Miranda Viscoli is the co-founder and co-president of New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence. NMPGV is a non-partisan 501 (c)3 whose sole purpose is the prevention of gun violence in New Mexico. She has created and implemented art-based gun violence prevention programs in schools throughout New Mexico and helped to design and organize the national gun buyback program, Guns to Gardens. She works with schools, school boards, police departments, legislators, city councils and the New Mexico Department of Health to implement gun violence prevention measures throughout the state. She was awarded Ten Who Made a Difference, the Mucho Gusto Award and the National 2021 Peaceseekers Award. She has been invited twice to the White House for her work in gun violence prevention.

Pedro Reyes

Pedro Reyes (Mexico City, 1972) studied architecture but considers himself a sculptor. His works integrate elements of theater, psychology and activism and take a variety of forms including penetrable sculptures (Cápulas, 2002-08) as well as puppet productions (The permanent revolution, 2014), (Manufacturing Mischief, 2018).

In 2008, Reyes initiated the ongoing Palas por Pistolas project in which 1,527 guns were collected in Mexico through a voluntary donation campaign to produce the same number of shovels to plant 1,527 trees. This led to Disarm (2012), where 6,700 destroyed guns were transformed into a series of musical instruments.

In 2011, Reyes started Sanatorium, a transient clinic offering brief unexpected treatments mixing art and psychology. Originally commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Sanatorium has been in operation at Documenta 13, Kassel (2012), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2013), The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada (2014) and OCA, São Paulo (2015) among 10 other venues.

In 2013, he presented the first edition of pUN: The People’s United Nations at the Queens Museum in New York. pUN is an experimental conference in which ordinary citizens act as delegates from each of the UN countries and try to apply techniques and resources from social psychology, theater, art and conflict resolution to geopolitics. The second edition of pUN was held at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2015). The third pUN General Assembly took place in December 2015 at the 21st Century Museum in Kanazawa, Japan.

In 2015, he received the U.S. State Department Medal for the Arts and the Ford Foundation Fellowship.

In late 2016, he presented Doomocracy, an immersive theatrical installation commissioned by Creative Time. He held a visiting faculty position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the fall of 2016, and held his residency at MIT CAST as the inaugural Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist. In addition, continuing his work with firearms, Pedro Reyes presented Return to Sender (2020) at the Tinguely Museum in Basel, which consists of a series of music boxes constructed from gun parts. Each box reproduces a well-known classical piece from the country of origin of the respective manufacturer. For Austria, a music box made from Glock gun parts plays Mozart; for Italy, Beretta guns play Vivaldi, etc. Alluding to the fact that the problem of violence begins in the factory where the guns are made.

Recently, Pedro Reyes was commissioned by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists together with ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, winners of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, to raise awareness of the growing risk of nuclear conflict. For this collaboration, he developed Atomic Amnesia which was presented in Times Square in May 2022. Reyes received the Luxembourg Peace Prize in 2021 for his work on disarmament.