Daniel Joseph Martinez  
California 
USA Broad Fellow, Visual Arts

In his work Daniel Joseph Martinez persistently returns to a series of unanswerable questions. He asks whether history is being written in terms of the economy, the free market, and the corporate museum, and how artists and individuals can organize an evolving, self-sustaining aesthetic to counter the prevalent paradigm. Setting these issues against a backdrop of political chaos and global instability, he asks whether autonomy is a state of being in which the dissolution of the self is part of the secularized belief in career, property ownership, success, and coupling. To counter this, he asserts that belief itself can be a catalyst for creative change. Martinez has worked in installation, photography, performance, and public art, among other media. T.G.

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Portrait photo courtesy Rudy Vega
If Only God had Invented Coca Cola, Sooner! or The Death of My Pet Monkey, San Juan Triennial, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2004; photo courtesy Daniel Joseph Martinez and the project, New York