Cristóbal Martínez is a

Chicano Chicano or Chicana is a chosen identity for many Mexican Americans in the United States. The label ''Chicano'' is sometimes used interchangeably with ''Mexican American'', although the terms have different meanings. While Mexican-American ident ...

artist and the founder o
Radio Healer
an indigenous hacker collective. He is a member of

Postcommodity Postcommodity, a Southwest Native American Artist collective, was founded in 2007 by Kade Twist and Steve Yazzie Their name refers to the "commodity era" of Native American art trading in the late 1800s and 1900s, with the "post" being in refere ...

, a Southwest Native American

Artist collective An artist collective is an initiative that is the result of a group of artists working together, usually under their own management, towards shared aims. The aims of an artist collective can include almost anything that is relevant to the need ...

. His work was featured in the 17th

Whitney Biennial The Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, United States. The event began as an annual exhibition in ...

,
57th Carnegie International
and the Sundance Film Festival. He currently is an Associate Professor at the

San Francisco Art Institute San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately ...

Education

Martínez attended

Arizona State University Arizona State University (Arizona State or ASU) is a public research university in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, ASU is one of the largest public universities by enrollment in the ...

, where he earned a bachelor's degree in studio art and painting in 2002. He remained at the university to earn a master's degree in media art in 2011 and a PhD in rhetoric, composition and linguistics in 2015. In 2003, he founded the Radio Healer.

Radio Healer

Martínez founded the indigenous hacker collective Radio Healer in 2003, a year after completing his first degree at Arizona State University. The collective is made up of Martínez, Melissa S. Rex, Mere Martinez, Rykelle Kemp, Randy Kemp, Ashya Flint, Edgar Cardenas, and Devin Armstrong-Best. Together they create indigenous electronic tools via circuit-bending, appropriation, salvaging, coding, recycling, adaptive reuse, and improvisation to perform indigenous ceremonies based on their imagination. Their art consisted of moving tools, images, performances, and sounds that aided in creating metaphors to address the semiotic systems that they state are often misinterpreted. The purpose of their collective is to combat these misinterpretations by giving the audience an opportunity to engage in re-imagining indigenous ceremonies. The collective hosts public performances, with the intent that the public will reflect on issues such as warfare, borders, mass surveillance, land use, socioeconomic issues, and historical amnesia. The collective was a former artist-in-residence at the Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix Arizona.

Select artwork

*
Animal Mother Moves the Four Winds of Rush Hour
' * ''This Machine Kills___'' * ''The Punisher'' (2012) * ''Death Machine''

Art residences

* Pueblo Grande Museum, Phoenix, Arizona 2011-2016

Awards and grants

* Artist Research and Development Grant 2016 * P.A.V.E 2009

Group exhibitions

* Connected Knowledge: Collaboration Across Boundaries 2007, Banff Centre, Banff, Canada * Faces, Tempe Center for the Arts, 2009, Tempe, Arizona * Phoenix Experimental Arts Festival, 2010, Phoenix, Arizona * ACM CHI Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2010, Atlanta, Georgia * Arizona Science and Technology Festival Conference, Skysong, 2014, Scottsdale, Arizona

Postcommodity

Martínez is a member of Postcommodity, an interdisciplinary artist collective consisting of himself and Kade L. Twist. The collective's aim is to form metaphors to make sense of shared experiences in a contemporary environment, create productive conversations that go against social, political, and economic processes that ruining communities and ruining geographic areas. Their work has exhibited in locations and events such as the

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...

's 2017 Biennial.

Select artwork

*''Repellent Fence'' (2015) *''How The Lights Get In'' (2019, with Guillermo Galindo) *''The Point of Final Collapse'' (2019)

Art residences

* Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2011 * Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado, 2014 * Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, 2015 * SOMA, Mexico City, Mexico, 2016 * Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey, 2017 * 18th Street Art Center, Santa Monica, California, 2019 * San Francisco Art Institute 2018-2019

Awards and grants

* Cycles of Creation, Decay and Renewal in Art and Life, Santa Fe Art Institute 2011 * Creative Capital Artist Grant 2012 * Art Matters Grant 2013 * Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Grant 2014 * Art of Change Fellowship, Ford Foundation 2017 * Fine Prize Carnegie Hall 2018

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Martínez, Cristóbal Arizona State University alumni Artists from Arizona Year of birth missing (living people) Living people