Gutierrez, Martine

American, b.1989

BiographyMartine Gutierrez is an artist, performer, and musician who produces elaborate narrative scenes that employ tropes of pop culture to explore the complexity, fluidity, and nuances of both personal and collective identity in terms of race, gender, class, indigeneity, and culture. Working across performance, photography, and film, Gutierrez simultaneously acts as subject, artist, and muse. She asserts control over her own image by executing every stage of the creative process—staging, lighting, makeup, costuming, modeling, and photography. Gutierrez’s self-produced (and wholly independent) art publication, Indigenous Woman (2018), disrupts and reappropriates the rarified space of cisgendered whiteness as an unquestioned ideal for bodies and figures in popular culture and iconography. As a 124-page glossy magazine, Indigenous Woman shows how deeply sexism, colorism, racism, transphobia, and other biases are embedded and ubiquitous. The images also celebrate the artist’s own autonomy and expansiveness of self.

Martine Gutierrez’s work has been featured many exhibitions, including at the Australian Centre for Photography, Darlinghurst; the Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth; and the Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh; the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; the New Museum, NY; and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia; among many others. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence, RI; Rockwell Museum, Corning, NY; and The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.