María Martínez-Cañas collection

María Martínez-Cañas (b. May 19th, 1960), in her own terms, is a queer Cuban-born, Puerto Rican-grown, American photographer. Her experimental work, which tests the limits of photography while remaining grounded in it, explores personal and national identities – most notably the concept of the self, memory, and migration. She is described by Manuel E González as “an alchemist mixing materials, methods and processes.” Martínez-Cañas’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions throughout the world including Julie Saul Gallery, New York; Freedom Tower, Miami; Schneider Gallery, Chicago; Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami; Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago; Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, FL; The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; and more. She has been the recipient of many awards and grants, including a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1988), a Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellowship (2014) in Umbertide, Italy, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Photography fellowship (2016). Her works reside in private and public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami; and the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Though born in Cuba, at just three months old Martínez-Cañas’s family moved to Miami and remained there until she was four years old, when they relocated again to Puerto Rico – where she spent her childhood and adolescence. Her early years in Puerto Rico indelibly shaped the artist she would become. Martínez-Cañas grew up in a household surrounded by art; her parents were collectors of Latin American and Cuban art – especially modernist art – and held works by Jesús Rafael Soto, Rogelio Polesello, Roberto Matta, José Luis Cuevas, Amelia Peláez, Wifredo Lam, and Carlos Mérida, among many others. Additionally, classical music gave sound to these artistic surroundings as her father played the violin and regularly held music and art gatherings at the home where Martínez-Cañas met numerous musicians and visual artists. Her fascination with photography began when, upon leaving Cuba as exiles, her mother carried with her a Rolleiflex Twin-Lens camera that enchanted María. She convinced her mother to let her play with the camera on the premise of cleaning it and taught herself to use it; at eight years old she developed her first roll of film and has continued to practice the art of photography ever since. Later in life she reflected on the deep significance of photographs and photography in her parents’ household, stating: “I absolutely believe that the importance of the photographic image to my parents as a ‘memory link’ to their homeland was a defining aspect in my life. Photographic images were a way to connect with family members, to know our roots, to know about Cuba” (Nuez).

In 1977, when Martínez-Cañas was just seventeen, she had her first exhibition at the Galeria Aboy in San Juan, Puerto Rico, which was a result of the support of her parents and other important mentors. One such mentor was the modernist Cuban painter Cundo Bermúdez, who was also in exile in Puerto Rico and a close friend of the Martínez-Cañas family – he was even commissioned to paint a portrait of the family by María’s father. Another family friend and important influence on Martínez-Cañas was the art curator and critic José Gómez-Sicre, whose archives were later bought as a gift for Martínez-Cañas by her father; extracts from these archival documents were scanned and reprinted and appear in the series, REBUS + DIVERSIONS (2016). In 2013 Martínez-Cañas reflected that, in excess of being the place where she was artistically and intellectually formed, growing up in Puerto Rico shaped the sense of ethnic identity that is explored in her works; “Puerto Rico also gave me an identity – as Latina…,” she relayed to Ramón Nuez.

Martínez-Cañas left Puerto Rico to attend the Philadelphia College of Art and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1982; she then pursued a Master of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating in 1984. Her first solo museum show, María Martínez-Cañas: Photographs, was held at Museo de Historia, Antropología y Arte, Universidad de Puerto Rico, in 1983. Later, in 1985, she was awarded a Fulbright-Hays grant which allowed her to move to Spain and conduct research for six months; during this time, she frequently visited the Archivo de Indias in Seville and Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid. While she consulted a wide variety of sources there, she mainly focused on maps from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries that recorded Spanish explorations of Cuba, such as those drawn by Christopher Columbus on his voyages around the Americas. These archival sources inspired her to create negatives based on Cuban maps and these works appeared in her 1990-1992 series, Black Totems. In particular, in “Encounters” (1991) she combined maps and geometric patterns with photographs of buildings to evoke a mystical Cuba, conjured from her own imagination. In “Quince Cellos Cubanos/Fifteen Cuban Stamps” (1991-92) she arranged generic photographs of place inside the quotidian format of the postage stamps, adhering to its confining borders. Her time in Spain had an irrevocable impact on her work and cemented the questions she has spent her career exploring; she reflected, “For the last few years my work has dealt with the search for a personal identity … the daily life of Cuban culture before the revolution, family stories, memories of Cuba where I was born but have no recollection of. After a while, I find myself with a terrible need of discovering, on my own, that which has been so unknown for so long. I am dealing … with a terrible sense of … separation, and alienation. I have always experienced a desire to belong to a 'particular place”’ (qtd. in Yorba). In 1986, Martínez-Cañas returned to the United States and settled in Miami.

Throughout her career, though to varying degrees in different projects, Martínez-Cañas’ work has been consistently invested in both the experimental and the personal. As Marcela Guerrero narrates, “Martínez-Cañas’s experiments with photography have included such diverse methods as utilizing stains, saliva, and onion skin and printing on tapestry, newsprint, and vellum. In 2007 she began to combine photographic images with hand-traced drawings printed on canvas in her ‘Tracing’ series.” Notably, in her Tetralogy series, which was shown in a museum installation in the Freedom Tower, Miami, during the winter of 2009/10, she digitally manipulated photographs taken by José Gómez-Sicre and photographs of her father. This experimentation resulted in “a technical intervention of images that pays homage to and defies the fatherly figures in her life” (Guerrero). In 2016, after experiencing an extremity of opposing emotions – on one hand she received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Photography fellowship and on the other she was coming to terms with the loss of a twelve-year relationship – Martínez-Cañas broke with the work she was doing previously and carved out new artistic territory. In four months of uninterrupted artistic labor she produced twenty large-scale works. Included in this collection are works that utilize documents contained in José Gómez-Sicre’s archives. Concerning these works, González narrates: “[Martínez-Cañas] considers the scanning and reprinting of this historical and archival material a transformative process: the rebirth of treasured originals that transcend their original Modernist intentions and brings them into the present as part of an inquiry trying to make sense of the fragmentary nature of memory and place.” After a very busy couple of years, Martínez-Cañas took some time off and is currently at work on another collection. Though she relayed in April 2020 that the project is still in its infancy, her comments to Jess T. Dugan concerning being a woman in the arts world are surely an indicator of the important work she will release in the future: “The struggles encountered through the years have made me resilient and determined. The constant struggles to prove my worth have made me stronger and continue, in many ways, to keep me always looking forward. I came to understand, through the years, that the things I can't control need to be dealt with in creative ways – that I just need to keep going. Always forward.”