Pedro Reyes has won international attention for large-scale projects that address current social and political issues. Through a varied practice utilizing sculpture, performance, video, and activism, Reyes explores the power of individual and collective organization to incite change through communication, creativity, happiness, and humor.
A socio-political critique of contemporary gun culture is addressed in Reyes’s ongoing Palas por Pistolas (Guns for Shovels), in which the artist worked with local authorities in Culiacán, Mexico, to melt down guns into shovels, then used to plant trees in cities elsewhere in the world. Similarly, in Reyes’ major continuing Disarm series, firearms confiscated by the Mexican government and donated to Reyes have been transformed into instruments, which are then activated by local musicians.
Issues of community and compassion are addressed in Sanatorium, activated at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2011), dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel, Germany (2012), The Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2013) and at The Power Plant in Toronto and The Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami (2014). In this work, visitors are invited to sign up for a ‘temporary clinic,’ with the mission of treating various kinds of urban malaise.
Most recently, Reyes has worked with The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and ICAN to stage anti-nuclear protests and performances across the world. Titled, Amnesia Atómica ZERO NUKES, this movement has found platforms in New York; Mexico City; Vienna and Oslo.
Alongside these performative, socially engaged strands of his practice, Reyes continues to make sculpture. Carved in red and black volcanic stone, marble and jadeite, these often monumental works that weave between figuration and abstraction reference sources as diverse as Greco Roman statuary; British Modernism and Mesoamerican sculpture.
Full Biography
Pedro Reyes (Mexico City, 1972) studied architecture but considers himself a sculptor. Although his works integrate elements of theater, psychology, and activism. His practice takes a variety of forms, from penetrable sculptures (Capulas, 2002-2008) to puppet productions (La Revolución Permanente, 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 in New York City, 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 was in residence at MIT CAST as the inaugural Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist.
In addition, continuing his work with firearms, Pedro Reyes installed 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. The work alludes 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 the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), winners of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, to raise awareness of the growing risk of nuclear conflict, for which he developed Atomic Amnesia to be presented in Times Square, New York City, in May 2022. For his work on disarmament, Reyes received the Luxembourg Peace Prize in 2021. At the same time, he inaugurated his largest exhibition to date in Mexico at the Museo MARCO in Monterrey.
In 2022, Reyes had his first solo exhibition in Europe, at the Marta Herford Museum in Germany, where he presented a large body of his early work. Starting in 2023, DIRECT ACTION was presented at SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico, followed by his Lisson Gallery show in Los Angeles. Following the Atomic Amnesia project, he developed Artists Against the Bomb, an editorial and art project that gathers international artists to create a collection of posters portraying messages urgently calling for universal nuclear disarmament. This has been shown in multiple spaces, such as the United Nations, the Judd Foundation in New York City, Lago Algo, Mexico City, and the Malta Biennale.
This fall, Reyes will participate in the first Macau Biennale in China and the International Art Biennial of Antioquia and Medellín in Colombia. He was also a featured speaker at the Aspen Ideas Festival and will present a solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery New York, opening in September 2025.