BIOGRAPHY

Martine Gutierrez (b. 1989) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, video, music, and performance. Through self-portraiture and cinematic tableaux, she reimagines identity as both material and method. Her body becomes a site of transformation, an instrument for examining desire and belonging.

Drawing from family archives and her multicultural heritage, Gutierrez melds autobiography with artifice. Her characters occupy a wide spectrum of archetypes—mainstream and marginal, sacred and satirical—embodying the ever shifting terrain of nationality, gender, and sexuality. Moving fluidly across mediums, from billboards to episodic films, music videos, and magazines, she recontextualizes and reclaims the visual language of consumerism and mass media.

Performing every role in her productions—artist, subject, muse—Gutierrez collapses boundaries between creation and consumption. Through costume, staging, and narrative invention, she interrogates how identity is constructed and performed. Her work invites viewers to examine how images inevitably shape the selves we inhabit.

Gutierrez’s earlier bodies of work—Real Doll (2013), Girl Friends (2014) and Line Up (2014)—explore gender, intimacy and fantasy, often incorporating mannequins as ambiguous characters in constantly shifting realities. Her semi-autobiographical film, Martine Part I - IX (2012 - 2016), is a meditation on personal transformation that begun while she was an undergraduate student at the Rhode Island School of Design, and was finished years later as a young artist in New York City. The episodic video work follows the eponymous character from Providence to New York via Central America and the Caribbean, communing with urban architecture and natural elements such as sand, water and air. Martine negotiates the permanent and the fleeting, moving from place to place, as she journeys to self-discovery.

In 2018, Gutierrez produced Indigenous Woman, a 124-page magazine replete with fashion spreads, product advertisements and a Letter from the Editor all dedicated, as Gutierrez describes it, to “the celebration of Mayan Indian heritage, the navigation of contemporary indigeneity and the ever-evolving self-image.” Through the style and construct of the glossy magazine, Gutierrez subverts conventional ideals of beauty to reveal how deeply sexism, racism, transphobia and other biases are embedded in our culture. This body of work has been exhibited all over the world, including the 58th Venice Biennale. In 2021, the Public Art Fund commissioned Gutierrez’s public art installation ANTI-ICON to be exhibited in over 300 bus shelters across New York City, Chicago, and Boston.

Gutierrez received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2012. She is also a published musician and has produced several commercial videos. Gutierrez lives and works in New York.

Gutierrez will debut a new performance in the forthcoming 2026 Whitney Biennial. In 2025, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2024, Gutierrez's landmark body of work ANTI-ICON: Apokalypsis was the focus of a solo exhibition at the Polygon Gallery in Vancouver, Canada. Recently, her work has also been featured in solo and group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA (2025); National Museum of Women in the Arts, DC (2025); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AR (2025); Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil (2024); Museum of Modern Art, NY (2024); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA (2024) Museum of Modern Art, NY (2024); Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2024); Fondation Carmignac, Hyères, France (2024); Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, UK (2024); Pérez Art Museum, FL (2023); and Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC (2023), among others.

Her work has been acquired by the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, OH; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, ME; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, CA; Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, VA; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, NY; Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, NH; McNay Art Museum, TX; Middlebury College Museum of Art, VT; Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, MA; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, IL; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Gallery of Art, DC; New Britain Museum of American Art, CT; Rhode Island School of Design Museum, RI; Rockwell Museum, NY; Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, MA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Tang Museum at Skidmore College, NY; Wake Forest University Art Collection, NC; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, among other institutions.