Martine Gutierrez is a transdisciplinary artist, utilizing photography and video to subvert various performances of pop-cultural tropes in the exploration of identity—both personally and collectively intersectional to the ideologies of power, beauty, and heritage. Her amass of media—ranging from billboards to episodic films, music videos and renowned magazine, Indigenous Woman—produce the very conduits of advertising that sell the identities she disassembles. Her examination of advertising allows for Gutierrez to hybridize the industry’s objectification of sex with the individual’s pursuit of self, satirically undermining the aesthetics of what we see everyday. While she manufactures ‘celebrity’ to pass as multinational corporations, it is Gutierrez herself who executes every role—simultaneously acting as subject, artist, and muse. Challenging the construction of binaries through the blurring of their borders, Gutierrez insists that gender, like all things, is entangled—and argues against the linear framework of oppositional thinking. These complicated intersections are innate to Gutierrez’s own multicultural upbringing as a first generation artist of indigenous descent and as an LGBTQ ally. Her malleable, ever-evolving self-image catalogs the confluence of seemingly disparate modes, conveying limitless potential for reinvention and reinterpretation.
Gutierrez’s earlier bodies of work—Real Doll, 2013, Girl Friends, 2014, and Line Up, 2014—explore gender, intimacy and fantasy, often incorporating mannequins as ambiguous characters in constantly shifting realities. Her semi-autobiographical film, Martine Part I – IX, 2012 – 2016, is a meditation on personal transformation that began while she was an undergraduate student at the Rhode Island School of Design, and was finished years later as a young artist in New York City. The episodic video work follows the eponymous character from Providence to New York via Central America and the Caribbean, communing with urban architecture and natural elements such as sand, water and air. Martine negotiates the permanent and the fleeting, moving from place to place, as she journeys to self-discovery.
In 2018, Gutierrez produced Indigenous Woman, a 124-page magazine replete with fashion spreads, product advertisements and a Letter from the Editor all dedicated, as Gutierrez describes it, to “the celebration of Mayan Indian heritage, the navigation of contemporary indigeneity and the ever-evolving self-image.” Through the style and construct of the glossy magazine, Gutierrez subverts conventional ideals of beauty to reveal how deeply sexism, racism, transphobia and other biases are embedded in our culture. This body of work has been exhibited all over the world, including the 58th Venice Biennale. In 2021, the Public Art Fund commissioned Gutierrez’s public art installation ANTI-ICON to be exhibited in bus shelters across New York City, Chicago, and Boston. In 2022, Gutierrez had a solo exhibition entitled Supremacy at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Gutierrez received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2012. She is also a published musician and has produced several commercial videos. Gutierrez lives and works in New York.
Her work has been featured in solo museum exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, MO; Australian Centre for Photography, Darlinghurst, New South Wales; Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, Houston, TX; Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, NC; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; and the Rockwell Museum, Corning, NY, among others.
Her work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, among others.
