The creative challenge of María Martínez-Cañas
After a fruitful career of more than 40 years, María Martínez-Cañas this year earned the prestigious Michael Richards prize awarded by the Miamibased Oolite Arts. Founded in 2018, and part of the Ellies prize program overseen by the organization each year, the Michael Richards is an award for artistic excellence for local artists.
With a rigorous process for nominations and selections and a jury of local and national curators and art experts, the Richards prize is today the most important recognition for a career in arts in our city. The two previous winners were Edouard Duval Carrie and Karen Rifas.
With its global identity, the work of Martínez-Cañas is characterized by its creative challenge, where photography works as the departure point for a solid experimental body that integrates collage, installation art, sound, time and objects in a constant questioning of the photographic body that peeks out like a mirror of contemporary identity.
Martínez-Cañas was born in Havana in 1960. Three months later, as a consequence of the changes shaking the island, her family moved to Miami and then Puerto Rico in 1964. It’s in that island, surrounded by the love of art and an origin culture fueled by her family, that at the age of eight she first begins to look at the world through the lens of a camera. The film has since been the emulsion capable of capturing the fleeting and revealing the hidden: the obsession of giving form to the intangible; the memories of a country she learned to love through parental love, the stories and mementoes that survive the sudden and forced departure
This loss of the original anchor is central to understanding the work of Martínez- Cañas, where the open questions about the I and cultural inheritance, the experimental and the attempts without fear of failure, mark the center of all her ideas. In a first stage, the artist’s experiments with 16mm film and incorporates music and engraving into her work. This includes her series Concert Book (1980-1981) and Fragment Pieces (1983), the latter marked by the minimalist study of space and the serial character that will mark her work forever.
In this first stage of her career (1986-1996) there are two essential series that act as complements. They are The Map Series (19861988) and Quince Sellos Cubanos, (1991-1992). The first covers about 30 works where colonial-era architectural drawings from the Archivo de Indias, which were photographed by the artist in situ, and the photographic collage from the family album are knit together into a potent and cathartic fable of reconstruction of the personal through the photographic fragment. This is also where the repressed (the inaccessible, the denied) is marked by military architecture, which rises as a barrier to memory. As contrast and complement, Quince Sellos Cubanos takes on the restoration of the broken link, with the stamps’ topics revisited in images recorded on silver gel. The same obsession for restoring memory took the artist to her series Black Totems (1991-1992), inspired in the works of Wifredo Lam, which makes feverish use of masking, collage, frottage, and direct manipulation of the photographic negative to reconnect personal history with the lost cultural inheritance.
The year 1996 marked a critical turn in the artist’s career. In January, she opened her colossal installation Años continuos at Terminal D in the Miami International Airport. The series, commissioned by Miami-Dade Art in Public Spaces, marks the endpage of her work during these years. Conveniently placed in the airport -- an excellent reflection of the “unplaces” defined by Marc Auge -the outstanding work fills all the space, covering a 40 by 40 foot atrium.
The use of glass and enamel and the black background projects a complex symbiosis of symbols where capricious maps travel documents, cultural icons and personal memorabilia are knit together into the only map possible -- the map of our personal existence. There, where the airport’s communications system, designed for the impersonal location of the here and now as a quick handle for the atomized I amid that transient and impersonal typology.
(Moore Space, 2001) and (Freedom Tower, 2009-2010), which was in four parts; :
(2005),
(2006), (2007) and
(2008-2009). Based on the photographic archives of Jose Gomez Sicre, a key figure in Latin American art within international modern art, Adaptations erases the images, leaving only the people, the architectural surroundings and empty pedestals in an impactful comment on historic omissions in favor of ideology.
From a much more intimate perspective, Duplicity as Identity, using superimpositions, photographic sequences and progressive transparency with stable percentages of increment, reflects a bi-logical reconstruction where the I and the other (daughter and father) develop communicating links: elongation, becoming and continuity of existence.
ALSO BASED ON THE ARCHIVES OF GOMEZ SICRE, REBUS+DIVER
SIONS Fredric Snitzer Gallery, 2017; Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh, Raleigh, North Carolina, 2019),
the most recent work by of Martínez-Cañas, seems to forecast a new turn in her work, one in which the photographic image coexists with other media such as writing, newspaper clippings and objects, breaking the two-dimensional plane to pop out into the physical space. Each one of the 20 works in Rebus is a sort of box-in-a-suitcase and a labyrinth where hints peek out but where the only path possible comes out of personal experience and the point of view of each viewer, immersed in this era of alternative realities and manipulation of information.
A graduate of the Philadelphia College of Art, and holder of a masters degree in photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the art and teachings of MartinezCañas -- who has been teaching at the New World School of the Arts since 1966 and earlier taught at the University of Miami -has been fundamental to the formation of generations of artists in our city. Her work has been collected by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa), the Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, Perez Art Museum (PAMM), George Eastman House, International Center of Photography, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Smithsonian’s American
Art Museum.
Janet Batet is an arts writer, curator and critic. She writes for different publications, galleries and museums.