Cristóbal Martínez

Cristóbal Martínez is a Chicano artist and the founder of Radio Healer, an indigenous hacker collective. He is a member of Postcommodity, a Southwest Native American Artist collective. His work was featured in the 17th Whitney Biennial, 57th Carnegie International, and the Sundance Film Festival.

He is currently a professor in the School of Art at Arizona State University.

Education Martínez attended Arizona State University, 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.

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.

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