FREDRIC SNITZER GALLERY

María Martínez-Cañas
Selected Early Works

October 22 - November 18, 2023

Fredric Snitzer Gallery is pleased to present María Martínez-Cañas, Selected Early Works. Surveying a significant decade of development within Martínez-Cañas’ practice, this exhibition focuses on works from 1986-1997. This presentation examines three distinct series, “The Maps Series,” “Totems,” and “Piedras,” spanning several developments within her experimental photo-based practice. Within this time frame, her work as an experimental photographer evolves from a concern with geography and personal identity while confronting personal issues like belonging, alienation, and positioning herself within the outside world.

A critical point within this period began with a 6-month Fulbright-Hays grant in Spain, collecting and researching visual materials to develop her work, which would set the tone for artistic production for the next decade. Her research led her to old maps and letters belonging to Cuba’s discovery by Christopher Columbus. The exposure to the form and content of these objects, representations of territories, and visual elements to locate transpired into using maps to chart personal interpretations of locating or finding oneself. Visual motifs such as barbed wire, walls, and spikes act as symbols of confinement and separation, while the use of nude figurative elements shows the vulnerability and duality within us; these are also symbols and motifs the artist uses to express her own sense of exile.

In 1989, Martínez-Cañas started to study the works of Cuban painter Wifredo Lam. Considering her use of Cuban maps as a foundation within her process, Lam’s work, full of symbols from the Cuban culture, was a logical continuation and new frontier to dive deeper into her roots, thus forming the “Totems” series, broken into two specific bodies “Black Totems” and “White Totems.” The visual motif of the totem stands for a family, clan, or tribe. It defines the self and is an essential marker of identity and place. It is a visual symbol that Martínez-Cañas could map, trace, and construct her interpretation of her heritage and history.

The final series of work, “Piedras” (Stones), departs from the complex cartographic compositions that previously dominated her oeuvre. This new exploration examines her present lived experience and steps away from her previous foundational focus, her identity, as it relates to her heritage. Inspired by a trip to Great Britain and Stonehenge, Martínez-Cañas pulls inspiration from the vast stone monolith with its etched recordings to create her own fluid composites of lines and images. A combination of photographic fragments from her travels along with images from ancient stone monuments and archeological site maps of other remote cultures such as the Maya, Martínez-Cañas adds natural materials of grass, ferns, and onion skins to form a primordial calcification much like fossils layered in sediments. Teeming with intricacy and a heightened sense of detail, “Piedras” marks a new terrain for exploration into flora, fauna, and organisms, which the artist will carry through to subsequent investigations within the medium.

María Martínez-Cañas’ trajectory as an artist is distinguished by questioning conventional practices in the field of conceptual photography. What is laid bare through this examination of her early works is her persistent devotion to advancing her knowledge of the medium to which she has dedicated much of her life. This decade within her practice, from 1986 to 1997, reveals a seminal formative period of understanding, experimentation, and reverence for her work.



María Martinez-Cañas (b. 1960, Havana, Cuba) lives in Miami, where she is a tenured professor at the New World School of the Arts. She studied at the Philadelphia College of Art and received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

An artist who works with innovative, non-traditional photographic media, she has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad, with 51 one-person exhibitions and over 300 group exhibitions.

Recent notable museum exhibitions include María Martínez-Cañas: Absence Revealed, Curated by Leilani Lynch, The Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, FL (2022); Rebus + Diversions, Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh, Raleigh, North Carolina (2019); Radical Conventions: Cuban American Art from the 1980's, Curated by Elizabeth Cerejido, Lowe Art Museum of Art, Coral Gables, Florida (2022); The Artist as Poet: Selections from PAMM’s Collection, Pérez Art Museum, Miami, Florida (2021); Destination: Latin America, from the Collection of The Neuberger Museum of Art, LSU Museum of Art, Baton Rouge, LA (2019); PST LA/LA: Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, Traveling Exhibition from Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California (2017) to Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York (2018) and Pinacoteca de Soa Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2018); PST LA/LA: Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, Traveling exhibition from Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California (2017) to Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York, New York (2018), Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, FIU, Miami, FL (2018), Portland Museum of art, Portland, ME (2019) and Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE (2019).

She is the recipient of the Oolite Arts 2020 Michael Richards Award, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation 2016 Photography Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation 2014 Visual Arts Fellowship, a Cintas Fellowship; a National Endowment for the Arts award; and a Fulbright-Hays Grant, among others.

Her work is in numerous public collections including the American Art Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, Florida; International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; Museé du Centre George Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; New York Public Library, New York, New York; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, Florida; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; among others.