Martínez-Cañas, Maria

Cuban, b. 1960

BiographyMaría Martínez-Cañas experiments with a myriad of photographic techniques to create hybrid, fragmented images that explore the mutability of culture, identity, and perception. Her work is an ongoing cross-cultural examination as she combines imagery from her Cuban family history and Puerto Rican upbringing. She and her family emigrated from Cuba to Miami and then Puerto Rico in the wake of the 1960s political revolution, leaving her with a lifelong curiosity about geographic, social, and artistic identity. Martínez-Cañas described her work as “a visual history of migration and displacement within [her] own life” in a 2020 interview with Strange Fire Collective.

Totem Negro (Black Totems) was one of Martínez-Cañas’s ongoing series in the early 1990s. To create these large-scale pieces, she hand-cut, arranged, and layered seemingly random images on a plain black rectangle. Drawing inspiration from the psychological mysticism of Surrealist painting and the geometric precision of architecture, the physical presence of the artist is imbedded in the dynamic, expressionist gesture of their making.

María Martínez-Cañas received her BFA from Philadelphia College of Art (1982) and her MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1984). She received a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship in 1985 and a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1988. In 2016, she was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Photography Fellowship. She began teaching in the photography department at New World School of the Arts, Miami in 1996. Her works are included in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; National Museum of American Art; Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and various others.