FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 9
3:30PM
ARMORY LIVE THEATER
Featuring artist Daniel Joseph Martinez—Moderated by Mari Carmen Ramírez, Wortham Curator of Latin American Art and Director, International Center for the Arts of the Americas at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Gilbert Vicario, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Phoenix Art Museum.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
DANIEL JOSEPH MARTINEZ
Daniel Joseph Martinez is an artist that lives and works in Los Angeles and Paris, France. He is the Donald Bren Chair, Distinguished professor at the University of California Irvine where he has taught for the last 32 years. He teaches in the Graduate Studies Program, New Genres Area and Critical & Curatorial Studies. Martinez has actively engaged in an interrogation of social, political, and cultural mores through actions and object production that have been described as nonlinear, asymmetrical, multidimensional propositions. Operating with fluidity and as open-source manifestations not bound by any singular category or theory. His works extend from the ephemeral to the solid. Martinez’s practice takes the form of aesthetic, theoretical and philosophical interventions to unapologetically question issues of personal and collective identity, vision and visuality, and the fissures formed between the appearance and the perception of difference. Ongoing themes include history, violence, nomadic power, contamination, cultural resistance, war, dissentience, systems of symbolic exchange and the unknown. Directed toward the precondition of politics coexisting as radical beauty immersed in the theorical propositions in and outside of human experience. There commonality is that they all address topics of race, class and the sociopolitical boundaries present within American society. Martinez represented the U.S. in 19 biennials worldwide, including the Venice Biennial, Istanbul Biennial, Berlin Biennial, Moscow Biennial, Lyon Biennial, three Whitney Biennials, Havana Biennial, Lima Biennial to name a few. He represented the United States in the American Pavilion in the Cairo Biennial, in Cairo Egypt. In addition to two international Biennial projects for U.S. Department of State. Martinez has received two lifetime achievement awards one from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the other from Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in Miami, Florida. Martinez has been actively exhibiting internationally for the past 40 years and has been included in over 250 group exhibitions and 30 solo exhibitions world-wide. In 2019 Martinez was inducted into the Smithsonian National Oral History Archive. “An honor reserved for Americans who have made major contributions to American culture”. The interview was conducted by the Chicano Scholar Chon Noriega, a Distinguished Professor at UCLA, in Film studies and Chicano studies. Martinez has received numerous individual artist grants including a Guggenheim Fellowship, three National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artists Fellowships, the Getty Museum fellowship, an Alpert Award in the Arts fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, A United States Artist fellowship, a Rockefeller foundation artist fellowship, California Arts Council Artist Fellowship, The Louise Comfort Tiffany Artist Fellowship, two Rasmuson Foundation individual artist fellowships, City of Los Angeles individual Artist fellowship. He is a recipient of both the Berlin prize and Rome prize. The Rockefeller fellowship residency at Bellagio, Italy, Artpace International residency, San Antonio, Texas, The Headlands Center for the Arts residency, Marin Country, The Anchorage Museum of Contemporary art residency, Alaska. Committed to grass-roots artist organizations with 30 years of curatorial experience. Martinez was a co-founder of Deep River (1997-2002) an artist run gallery in downtown Los Angeles which existed as a five-year project producing 45 solo exhibitions for Los Angles artists, He co-founded LA><Art with Lauri Firstenberg and was active as a curator and board member for 10 years. Martinez is represented by 5 artist monographs to date. With two new book publications in the works. One of his extensive work from Berlin, Rome and Bellagio, Italy. Martinez’s work can be found in public collections in the United States including; The Museum of Modern Art, MOMA, The Whitney Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, MOCA, LACMA, Los Angeles California Museum of art, The Getty Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, MFA, Orange County Museum, OCMA, Linda Pace Foundation, San Antonio, Texas, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, Florida.
Image courtesy of the speaker.
GILBERT VICARIO
Gilbert Vicario joined the Phoenix Art Museum in 2015 as The Selig Family Chief Curator. Prior to joining the Phoenix Art Museum, he was senior curator and division head for curatorial affairs at the Des Moines Art Center from 2009-2015. Recent exhibitions include Desert Rider, an exhibition of Indigenous and Latinx artists from the southwest (traveling to Denver Art Museum); Stories of Abstraction: Contemporary Latin American Art in the Global Context, which featured gifted works from the Nicolas Pardon collection in Irvine, CA; along with Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist (traveled from the Phoenix Art Museum to New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Palm Springs Art Museum, California). Upcoming exhibitions include the California Biennial 2022, opening October 8th at the Orange County Museum of Art, and Xican-a.o.x.-Body co-curated with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Marissa Del Toro for American Federation for the Arts in New York. In 2006, Vicario was named U.S. Commissioner for the International Biennale of Cairo by the U.S. Department of State for the exhibition Daniel Joseph Martinez: The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant; and he was a participating curator in the 2007 Lyon Biennial: The History of a Decade That Has Not Yet Been Named. Vicario is a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and started his career at the Philadelphia Museum of Art where he established his passion for organizing exhibitions. He subsequently worked at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Image courtesy of the speaker.
MARI CARMEN RAMÍREZ
Mari Carmen Ramírez is the Wortham Curator of Latin American Art and founding Director of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. A globally renowned authority on modern and contemporary Latin American art, Ramírez has published extensively and curated numerous exhibitions, including the award-winning Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America (2004, with Héctor Olea); Beatriz González: A Retrospective (with Tobias Ostrander, 2019); Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color (2006); Contingent Beauty: Contemporary Art from Latin America (2015); HOME, So Different, So Appealing (with Chon Noriega and Pilar Tompkins, 2017); Joaquín Torres-García: Constructing Abstraction with Wood (Menil Foundation, 2009). In addition to her work with Latin American art and artists, Ramírez has published widely on a broad range of topics that include the relationship of this art to identity politics, multiculturalism, globalization, and curatorial practice. She’s also conceptualized and implemented the ICAA Documents of 20th Century Latin American and Latino Art Project, a major digital archive and book series focused on primary sources. In 2005, Ramírez received the Award for Curatorial Excellence granted by the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. That same year, TIME magazine named her one of “The 25 Most Influential Hispanics in America.”
Image courtesy of the speaker.
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