Pedro Reyes

Producing both artworks and social spaces, Pedro Reyes seeks to develop critical discourses with his audience. The founder of several temporary project spaces, Reyes creates works that involve audience participation in large, but short-lived, projects. Notable works include a series of puppet shows featuring imagined humorous but philosophical conversations between Karl Marx and Adam Smith concerning the nature of labor and economic value, and the ongoing work Palas por Pistolas (Shovels for Pistols), begun in 2008, for which he collected 1,527 guns voluntarily relinquished by citizens of the Mexican town of Culiacán, which were then reprocessed into shovels and distributed to schools and art organizations with the aim of planting 1,527 trees. 

Reyes’s work has been shown internationally since the early 2000s, with shows and performances at institutions such as the Walker Art Center, the Guggenheim Museum, Miami’s Bass Museum of Art, and the Lyon Biennale, among other venues.