How Pedro Reyes uses art to recast tools of violence
Gun statistics in Pedro Reyes’s home country are grim. While there are no gun manufacturers there—most come illegally from the United States, the world’s largest provider—Mexico is among six countries with the highest level of firearm mortality, according to the National Institutes of Health. But in 2004, the stats became pointedly personal. A dear friend, the artist Luis Miguel Suro, was shot and killed by a mugger and, soon after, Reyes’s uncle Luis was killed during a carjacking. “He didn’t have time to take off his seatbelt,” he says.
Ever since, Reyes has used art to address a wide range of topics and interests, from nuclear proliferation to mental health, Mesoamerican history to economic theory to architecture, his initial field of study. But guns have remained a consistent topic of exploration in his practice over the next two decades, a timespan during which the issue has remained stubbornly, and tragically, relevant.
Reyes’s fall 2025 visit to Carleton proves the point. A month before his September trip from Mexico City to Northfield, a gunman killed two schoolchildren at the Church of the Annunciation in Minneapolis and injured 30 others. During the 57 days his artwork was on view at the Perlman Teaching Museum—part of Ahimsa, an exhibition named after the Sanskrit word for nonviolence—there were 72 mass shootings in the United States. Then, a month after the show closed, two Brown University students were killed (nine others were injured) in a campus shooting—two of 488 Americans killed in mass shootings last year. The broader context: while overall gun deaths have decreased over the last five years, to 14,520 in 2025, gun-related suicides in the U.S. have never been higher.
What new thinking could art bring to such an intractable issue, he wondered. To find out, he turned to some very old thinking.
Swords into Plowshares
On one wall of the Perlman exhibition this fall was a line of shovels, wooden handles with silver-hued heads up, seemingly waiting to be grabbed by a work crew for a day of labor. Part of Reyes’s first gun-related project, 2007’s Palas por Pistolas (Guns for Shovels), they were made from guns that were voluntarily surrendered in Culiacán, a region in the Mexican state of Sinaloa: 1,527 guns were turned in, melted, and cast into 1,527 shovel heads. And whenever the project is exhibited, Reyes plants a tree, including a disease-resistant elm added outside the Weitz Center on September 24. The goal is poetic: by the time he’s done, one tree will stand in place of each gun.
Reyes says he took inspiration for the project from ancient spiritual traditions—among them, the Buddhist notion of the lotus flower growing out of mud and Egyptian cosmology around the scarab beetle, birthed from eggs laid in dung, a process echoed in the story of the scarab-faced god Khepri who pushed the life-giving sun across the sky just as a beetle pushes a dung ball. But most directly was a reference to a well-known passage in the Old Testament book of Isaiah. “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”
“The dark part of human nature is guns,” he says, adding, “I’m interested in transformations where the instruments of death can become instruments of life.”
Instruments of Life
But, as Reyes told attendees at his Ward Lucas Lecture in the Arts, he felt the origin of the metal in Palas por Pistolas was obscured: there would be more power in keeping visible the steel’s past life as weaponry. With this in mind, he started his 2012 Disarm series. He obtained 6,700 destroyed military guns from the Mexican Secretary of Defense and began converting them into musical instruments, among them a marimba, a drum kit, a harmonica, and, in two works featured in the Carleton exhibition, a pan flute and an imposing-looking electric guitar that both aesthetically and literally embodies “heavy metal.”
By transforming the metal of guns into something more generative, he aims to sublimate some of those energies. “It’s not about suppressing them or neutralizing them, but putting them through a process to channel them into something that has a different effect,” Reyes says. “It is not about denying the role that violence has, but it asks, as a society, what are we going to do with it?”
“It is not about denying the role that violence has, but it asks, as a society, what are we going to do with it?”
One of the musicians called on to help make this transformation was Jeremy Tatar, assistant professor of music, who played Reyes’s flute in a performance with guitarist Mark Kreitzer, senior lecturer emeritus in music, at an exhibition-related event. The experience was, in several regards, heavy. Reyes’s pan flute, made up of eight gun barrels atop a pistol grip and trigger, weighs five pounds, far weightier than the half-pound concert flute Tatar usually plays. Then there’s the obvious conceptual heft: it was made from weapons with the capacity to kill.
Tatar was born in Australia and educated in Canada, countries with strict gun regulations, so the experience was his first encounter with firearms. He’d never held one, never fired one, let alone brought one near his face.
“There was a kind of cognitive dissonance of having my lips and my embouchure so close to the barrel of what used to be a firearm,” says Tatar. “I tried to shut out wondering about the past lives of these firearms, what kinds of histories they might’ve held, instead trying to see this as an instrument, a tool with the potential to create music.”
For the performance, “we ended up improvising on a relatively simple idea of simultaneous melodic ideas, moving in counterpoint with each other and trying to feed off of each other’s gestures and energy.”
The project aims to leverage the emotional allure of guns, which factored into Reyes’s thinking about the guitar Kreitzer wielded. “I think there’s a reassurance that comes with carrying a gun, which compensates for other things,” Reyes says. “Guns are not used only to produce harm through the gunshot, but also produce fear. And I think that that’s why guns are associated with masculinity, mostly.”
Like guns, guitars can have “a kind of mystical power,” he adds. Think of the axe-wielding lead guitarist mesmerizing the crowd with his or her prowess.
“Everyone is connected by the experience of whoever is playing the music. The instrument gives the performer a kind of power over a group,” Reyes says. “I wasn’t hoping to neutralize or reduce its power, but just to change the polarity into something that also has power.”
Amending the Amendment
Kreitzer and Tatar’s performance preceded a September 23 event called Amendment to the Amendment, which is centered on the deceptively simple language of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
“It’s a critical thinking exercise,” explains Sara Cluggish, Mary Hulings Rice Director and Curator of the Perlman Teaching Museum. “If you had the freedom to change this constitutional amendment in any way, how would you rewrite it? It’s simple, but it’s also a real challenge.”
“If you had the freedom to change this constitutional amendment in any way, how would you rewrite it?”
Inspired in part by activist and Brazilian theater artist Augusto Boal’s concept of “legislative theater,” the workshop asks attendees to consider ways to clarify text that’s remained unchanged since ratification in 1791. Then, in small groups, each participant shares their edit, whether anti- or pro-gun. The Carleton event wasn’t recorded, to create a space for open communication among participants, but past iterations have included proposed changes as small as adding a comma to more sweeping proposals, like deleting or clarifying vague language about a “well-regulated militia.”
The workshop’s aim is exceedingly simple, Reyes says. “The only idea is to say law is something that we gave ourselves in order to have a better society, and we have the power to improve that legislation,” Reyes says. “And it’s not up to me to say how that improvement should be.”
Symbolic Art or Direct Action?
In curating Ahimsa, Cluggish stuck to a mission she has for the Perlman: “to find work that felt relevant to college students and the scholars who teach them.” For students today, whose childhoods were filled with lockdown drills mandated in many states after the Sandy Hook mass shooting, gun violence is “something that has touched this generation in a way that I didn’t have to contend with when I was growing up,” Cluggish says. “Within that context, Pedro and I identified that he wanted to focus on works that had a more activist tone.”
“My understanding is that’s a label he really embraces.” She adds, “Not all artists consider themselves activists with a capital A.”
Indeed, many artists who tackle political and societal issues in their work do so through symbolic means. Whatever change they may seek may come through emotional impact or the awareness-building that comes with framing events in the news within an art context: Picasso depicting the horrors of the Spanish Civil War in Guernica, for instance, or Dana Schutz’s Open Casket, a controversial painting of Emmet Till created in 2016 in response to police brutality against Black Americans.
But while Reyes uses symbolism, metaphor, and allusion in his work, he also tackles social problems more directly, as interventions into society. As evidence is the title of a 2023 exhibition of Reyes’s art at SITE Santa Fe, DIRECT ACTION, which included the works in the Carleton show. The name refers to both Reyes’s sculptures, created by directly shaping raw materials into art, and a form of activism that, as the Santa Fe museum describes, “utilizes direct, often physical action to achieve political and social aims, rather than appealing to a higher authority for legitimacy.”
In the case of Palas por Pistolas, the exhibition title is quite literal in its cause-and-effect proposal: “Effectively, for each gun, now there’s a tree,” Reyes says, “and if you have destroyed 1,000 weapons, you can at least assume that maybe a few lives have been saved.”
The scale of the issue is mind-boggling, says Caitlin McMurtry ’09, who teaches public health as an assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. “There are 1.25 guns for every American, but that count was made before the huge gun-buying spike that we saw during the pandemic. And some of the best estimates are that more than 50 percent of people are carrying a loaded gun in public in some way every month.”
And, as her research has found, “the more guns we have in society, the more deaths and injuries that we see from accidents, from homicides, from suicides.”
Still, Reyes remains hopeful for long-term change, at the community and, eventually, the legislative level. During his Santa Fe exhibition he partnered with New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence, a group that in 2016 took inspiration from Reyes’s sculptures to start Guns to Gardens, a program that sells gardening tools made from guns purchased in its buyback program. In the 2023 collaboration, Reyes designed a series of vases made from gun parts acquired through New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence buybacks. The vases were welded by local students and sold as works of art, with prices ranging from $500 to $1,500 each. As with Guns to Gardens, all proceeds are funneled back to New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence to fund future buybacks.
“If you want to talk about change, you need to be able to measure somehow,” Reyes says. “That flower vase sold for $1,500? A hundred percent of the proceeds went to gift cards [used in buybacks]. The exchange rate for some of these guns is $150, so if you’re buying one of these gun vases, you’re effectively removing 10 guns from the streets.”
When it comes to these projects, it seems tangible change is more important to Reyes than how the work is defined. “It’s not that important whether you consider them art or not. The ideas come from art, but a lot of people have participated without thinking of it as art, and that doesn’t make it less meaningful.”
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