When Irish artist Brian Maguire first heard about the epidemic of missing and murdered young factory girls in Juárez, he was visiting friends in Idaho. While in Sandpoint, he happened to pick up a book — new at the time — called “The Daughters of Juarez: A True Story of Serial Murder South of the Border,” written by two Mexican journalists. The book described how young women and girls, mostly factory workers, were being murdered and their assaulted bodies dumped on the edge of the city. Other young women disappeared, never to be found. These murders and disappearances had been documented since at least 1990 and they reflected the type of injustice Maguire has, for decades, felt compelled to address in his paintings — a persistent systemic neglect and exploitation of the most disenfranchised people.
“[The story] affected me hugely,” Maguire says. “Because it seemed to contain all the things I had ever been interested in, which were class discrimination, gender discrimination, racism and abuse of young women by men — each of those things I had touched on. But this story contained all of them together.”
Maguire is the opposite of an armchair artist. His projects have taken him all over the world and he’s created works focused on prisoners, refugees and the homeless, among other groups. But he’s also an activist, and his approach takes into careful consideration the people he is making art about.
In 2008, he began traveling regularly to Juárez, embedding himself in the heart of the crisis. Key to Maguire’s process is that his art not be an act of extraction. Over the course of four years, he met with families of the missing — mostly mothers — listened to their stories, absorbed their grief and slowly created portraits of the missing and murdered family members based on photos the families provided, which he always promptly returned. (“I take nothing. If I get a photo from a family, I photograph the photo, because I lose everything anyway,” he says, laughing. “I’m a disaster.”)
A teacher he had been introduced to, who had decided to take action after a second student of hers disappeared, told him she would give him access to the families if he agreed to teach art workshops to orphaned children in the community — which he did.
“I make a portrait for the family out of respect for what they have done in allowing me to enter into their private story, because the individual who’s gone is private. But the story is a public story, and there should have been a public response, which is law enforcement, trial, a conviction and a sentence.”
“I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was a very nice offer,” he says. “I rented a room in a hotel, and some people helped me with materials, and we got a session going with the children. We continued it with them for many years. It was great fun to work with the children — painting and so forth.”
For every portrait he painted, he made two versions: one to give to the family, the other to exhibit publicly. The act was both intimate and confrontational. It gave the family something back and also provided a visual assertion to the public that these women mattered, that their lives extended beyond headlines and statistics.
That same ethic — of deep listening, community collaboration, and insistence on dignity — is what now brings Maguire to Missoula. Beginning June 6, the Missoula Art Museum presents “Outrage: Missing and Murdered Indigenous People in Montana,” a new exhibition that marks Maguire’s continued commitment to bearing witness. And, in this case, Maguire joins a growing chorus of artists, advocates, and families speaking out against the MMIP crisis that has devastated Native communities across North America and which, like the crisis in Juárez, is an example of systemic failure.
Maguire came to the MMIP project through MAM’s chief curator, Brandon Reintjes. Every morning, on his way to work, Reintjes observed photocopied sheets with pictures of missing Iindigenous girls and women. He knew about the type of work Maguire did and reached out to him.
Like the Juárez project, “Outrage” did not begin in a studio. It began in living rooms, on front porches, and in kitchens. Over the past five years (minus a gap year due to health reasons), Maguire has met with impacted Indigenous families across Montana, listening as they shared stories of loved ones lost to murder and disappearance. And again, as in Juárez, Maguire approached the work with care, asking each family for permission to paint their loved one’s portrait. And as he did before, he painted two versions each time: one gifted to the family, the other created for public display.
“I make a portrait for the family out of respect for what they have done in allowing me to enter into their private story, because the individual who’s gone is private,” Maguire says. “But the story is a public story, and there should have been a public response, which is law enforcement, trial, a conviction and a sentence. But this never happens in Juarez. This never happened with the right people in Juarez. It’s rare enough in Montana.”
The portrait, as a concept, has achieved different goals across time and place. Commissioned portraits have, most often, depicted the wealthy and powerful. But Maguire’s approach turns the more traditional concepts of portraiture on their head. Before Juarez and “Outrage,” he spent time painting the portraits of incarcerated people in prison and those in mental institutions, again, creating one private portrait and one public portrait for each person — and then offered first ownership rights of the private portrait to the subject.
“I always felt that that was subverting the history of portraiture as well as the history of incarceration, because the history of incarceration is the loss of your name — the loss of your identity,” Maguire says. “So to make a portrait of somebody in that circumstance is to enforce his identity. That was the thinking there.”
The public portraits he makes are slightly different from the private ones. And a main purpose of the public portraits for “Outrage,” Maguire says, is to say, “This person was here.”
“It’s an effort to show public recognition of the person who was there — who’s no longer there,” he says. “Normally, the process of law enforcement — judicial hearing, imprisonment [of the perpetrator] — serves as the public recognition of what was done to the person. But when those don’t happen, when the person isn’t found, there’s nothing there for the family.
“I’m not the only one doing this by any means,” he adds. “Filmmakers, journalists, artists, sculptors have all, in their own way, in their own time, worked on this subject. And the subject exists from Alaska to Chile, down that mountain range, right on down. And it’s always the poor.”
During his time working on the Juarez project, Maguire was also working on related projects in the broader U.S.-Mexico border region — efforts that complemented and deepened the themes emerging from Juárez. For “The Arizona Project” he painted the victims of massacres perpetrated by various cartels, as well as a set of 16 works commemorating migrants who died of exhaustion and/or dehydration in the Sonora Desert around Tucson.
“His palettes superimpose cold greys and greens on to warm pink flesh to depict a blighted, often sepulchral human species. Suddenly, there’ll be a head sculptured in charcoal and blue gouache, deep-toned and severe, but beautiful.”
Maguire says he learned over the years, working in Juarez, that the resistance that mothers engaged in — at whatever level — was essential to them maintaining their sense of being.
One mother knew who had taken her daughter — a policeman who had already received attention from law enforcement for offenses against women, but instead of being held accountable, he was shifted around to different posts.
But the mother never gave up, he says, despite the actions of law enforcement.
“She wrote poems about them,” Maguire says. “She put the poems to music, sang songs. They responded with weapons of law enforcement … tanks with machine guns surrounding her house. That never stopped her. She was in her 80s when I met her and she was still going strong. And she was full of laughter. This is what I mean about the necessity of resistance.”
Unlike a serial killer case, which is understood as an aberration within a functioning justice system, the Juárez femicides are committed by multiple perpetrators — individuals and gangs, and organized networks involving human trafficking or drug cartels. Multiple actors are also the perpetrators of the MMIP crises. The violence in both cases is enabled by socioeconomic and structural conditions — like on reservations, where lack of transportation forces people to walk the highways that cut through the land, leaving them exposed to speeding vehicles and those with dark intent. The violence is also driven by cultural norms and the normalizing of gendered violence. It is often ensured by under-resourced, corrupt, or apathetic policing, which means these crimes are rarely investigated or prosecuted.
In both the U.S. and places such as Juárez, the scope and urgency of the crisis have often been obscured — not only by the failure of institutions to respond, but also by the inability of early observers to recognize a pattern. Thousands of Indigenous men, women, and children go missing or are murdered each year, and the jurisdictional complexity of federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies frequently hinders meaningful investigation or resolution.
And though it’s getting much more press now, a lack of media coverage has historically helped keep the epidemic in the dark.
Maguire’s captivation with social injustice stems from an early age. He recalls when the student revolution erupted in Paris in May 1968 and the ways in which the political and social aftershocks shaped the events of 1969, the year he turned 18. The changes in France’s government and events in the U.S. at the time influenced the Irish, Maguire says. “Because in America, you had the eruption from the ghettos. You had the Black Panther Party. And information from all this came over [to Ireland]. So there was a period of young people’s resistance to oppression in Europe and in America at that same time, and that certainly would have been a very strong influence for me.”
Maguire’s formative years at the National College of Art and Design were profoundly shaped by the institution’s symbolic and physical location. At the time, it was housed in the repurposed stables of the former Lord Lieutenant’s residence — a seat of British colonial authority that, after independence, became a hub for Ireland’s political and cultural institutions.
“Every day, when we went into college, we brushed shoulders with lawmakers who we were not too happy with,” Maguire says. “It gave us a political outlook. They eventually moved us to a working class district in the west of Dublin. Now the work coming from the college is more socially engaged than political.” But his experience there left a lasting imprint on his creative path. “The environment that you go to college in affects you,” he says. “I would always maintain that.”
On its website, the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin describes the intersection of Maguire’s activism with his painting style, saying, “his direct observation of conflict zones put his practice adjacent to forms of war reporting or photojournalism” while, in the studio, his task “is to transform his testimony into blisteringly powerful works of art.”
Ed Vulliamy described the rawness of Maguire’s portraits perfectly in a 2014 article in The Guardian when he wrote that his paintings “deploy bold strokes. His palettes superimpose cold greys and greens on to warm pink flesh to depict a blighted, often sepulchral human species. Suddenly, there’ll be a head sculptured in charcoal and blue gouache, deep-toned and severe, but beautiful.”
When families share their stories, Maguire says, their missing loved ones — daughters, mothers, sisters — become real in the room. And it seems like the overlooked details, the ignored warnings — the accumulation of small failures — are the difference between someone being trafficked or murdered and someone coming home.
As a public exhibition, “Outrage” is a way of making visible what systems have allowed to remain unseen. Each portrait becomes both a tribute and a refusal to let someone disappear without notice and without a name.
“Outrage” is a way of making visible what systems have allowed to remain unseen. Each portrait becomes both a tribute and a refusal to let someone disappear without notice and without a name.
“It’s really not my place to say what should have been done,” he tells me. “That’s for you to say.” What he wants to make clear is this: “These are not stories of people who died by gunfire while committing crime. That is not what we’re talking about here.”
When I ask Maguire about the current situation in the U.S. — where immigrants and refugees are being detained or deported without due process — he recalls a time in Ireland before refugee protections were in place, when young asylum-seeking women were trafficked and prostituted across the country, largely unnoticed and unreported.
These are the kinds of systems that disappear the most vulnerable — whether on reservations, at borders, or in the aftermath of war. In plain sight and in the spaces where no one is looking.
“You know,” Maguire says, “somebody mentioned to me recently that every war that ever existed produces refugees. Look at the images from World War II, the people fleeing ahead of the armies. And it’s still the same mass of humanity fleeing. My sympathy will always be with the powerless.”
MAM will host a public opening reception on First Friday, June 6, from 5 to 8 p.m., with a special gathering at 6 p.m. to welcome participating families, with remarks from artist Brian Maguire. A panel discussion on Sat., June 7, from 11 a.m to 1 p.m. will bring together Maguire, writer Lucy Cotter, and scholar and activist Kathryn Shanley to reflect on the layers behind “Outrage” — from its personal origins to its broader cultural urgency.
