Skip to main content

Header Navigation

Artists

Cristóbal Martinez

He // Him // His

Installation Artist

Tempe, Arizona

A grayscale photograph of a man with long dark hair wearing glasses. The photograph has little light, which causes his dark hair and black shirt to fade into the background.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

My intention is to make poetic an idea-driven, propositional, and self-implicating art situated within social anxieties by reimagining sites of contest, controversy, and consequence into those of generative public pedagogy, curiosity, and discourse.”

Cristóbal Martínez, PhD is from Alcalde, New Mexico and is of the Genizaro and Manito people from throughout northern New Mexico including Española, Abiquiu, Velarde, Pó t'síí pangeh, Embudo, and Dixon. Martínez is an artist, publishing scholar, and Professor of Expanded Arts at Arizona State University.

Martínez co-founded the artist-hacker ensemble Radio Healer in 2003; joined the internationally acclaimed indigenous interdisciplinary artist collective Postcommodity in 2009; and co-created with post-Mexican artist–composer Guillermo Galindo the experimental electronic music ensemble Red Culebra in 2018. Martínez has dedicated his practice to interdisciplinary collaboration in contemporary art and continues his work within these groups.

Martínez has exhibited nationally and internationally including at the Contour Biennial, the Adelaide International, the Biennale of Sydney, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the Whitney Biennial, Art in General, documenta14, the Carnegie International, the Walker Art Center, Desert X, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Art Institute, LAXART, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Remai Modern Museum, Telematic, Southern Exposure, and Repellent Fence at the US/Mexico border.

Donor -This award was generously supported by Mellon Foundation.

This artist page was last updated on: 07.11.2024

Nine images of landscapes, all featuring bodies of water, displayed on a surround-style projector. Two low-top rectangular benches are dimly lit in the center of what appears to be an exhibition-style projector room.

Going to Water by Postcommodity (Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist), 2021. Multi-channel video and sound. Installation view of Postcommodity: Time Holds All The Answers. Remai Modern Museum, Saskatoon, SK.

Photo by Blaine Campbell, courtesy of Remai Modern Museum.

A group of four people work together, all at different stations, in front of a large black-screen projector to project interactive moving images that are on display, in green on the projector screen.

Let Us Speak Frog by Red Culebra (Cristóbal Martínez and Guillermo Galindo), 2022. Electronic music composition using Korg synthesizers, algorithms, voice, and Moog Vocoder, ritual performance, and real-time interactive moving images/ digital puppets. McEvoy Foundation, San Francisco, CA.

Photos courtesy of McEvoy Foundation.

The hands of three people toying with wires of what appears to be electronic music  synthesizers shot from a birds-eye view angle in black and white.

Wondering in the Woods by Radio Healer (Edgar Cardenas, Randy Kemp, Raven Kemp, Rykelle Kemp, Cristóbal Martínez and Meredith Martinez), 2022. Single-channel video installation, 30:22 minutes. Commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences for Pacific Standard Time (PST) 2024, Getty Foundation, Los Angeles, CA.

Photo courtesy of Radio Healer.