Daniel Joseph Martinez
Monday, April 3, 6:00 p.m.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Rubloff Auditorium, 230 S. Columbus Dr.

Throughout his nearly four-decade career, Daniel Joseph Martinez has engaged in an interrogation of social, political, and cultural mores through artworks that have been described as nonlinear, asymmetrical, and multidimensional propositions. Operating with fluidity and as open-source manifestations not bound by any singular category, his works extend from the ephemeral to the solid. Martinez’s practice takes the form of text, sculpture, photography, painting, installation, robotics, performance, and public 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 contamination, history, surveillance, violence, nomadic power, cultural resistance, war, dissentience, and systems of symbolic exchange, directed toward the precondition of politics coexisting as radical beauty. Their commonality is that they all address topics of race, class, and sociopolitical boundaries present within American society.

Martinez represented the United States in 11 biennials worldwide, including the 45th Venice Biennale; 12th Istanbul Biennial; 6th Berlin Biennale; 2008 California Biennial; 2013 Lyon Biennale, France; 1993 and 2008 Whitney Biennials. He represented the United States in the American Pavilion for the 2006 Cairo Biennial, in addition to two international projects of the US Department of State. Martinez has received three National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artists Fellowships, a fellowship from the Getty Center, an Alpert Award in the Arts, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Most recently, Martinez received the prestigious honor of receiving the Guna S. Mundheim Visual Arts Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany (Berlin Prize) in 2016. Committed to grass-roots organizations, Martinez was a co-founder of Deep River and LA><Art, both in Los Angeles. He remains active on multiple nonprofit boards, is represented by five monographs, and is currently working on a new book based on his residency in Berlin. Martinez is a Donald Bren Distinguished Professor of Art at the University of California at Irvine.

Presented in partnership with the Office of the Dean of Graduate Studies

Image: Daniel Joseph Martinez, Karl-Marx-Allee is a monumental socialist boulevard built by the GDR between 1952 and 1960 in Berlin, former East Berlin / East Germany, 2017, digital photograph. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California

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Tags: Chicago, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Loop, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Visiting Artists Program