Gabriel Martinez

Gabriel Martinez (born 1973 in Alamogordo, New Mexico) is an artist, writer, and performer based in Houston, Texas , working mostly in sculpture, installation and performance.

Martinez graduated from Columbia University in 2007 with a Masters of Fine Arts in Visual Arts. Martinez attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2006 and the Whitney Independent Study Program . He was a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship recipient in 2019. Martinez has been an artist-in-residence at both the Joan Mitchell Center and at MacDowell.

Martinez's work over the last twenty-two years digs into the relationship between art, public space and collective memory in order to uncover lost social histories. Martinez has established a set of ongoing gestures based on his interactions with American cities, including urban guerrilla interventions, gathering and repurposing street debris and re-appropriations of public semiotic codes. Martinez understands the relationship between art and public spaces not from the standpoint of an integration with architecture and the landscape, but in a more radical if precarious, civic sense of art in the public interest. Wandering through the narrow shoulders of car-centric cities, Martinez operates as a gleaner in a wasteland, rummaging through glass, bricks, trash and signage. The public artist becomes a rag picker of signs and refuse.

His best-known for his publication Garments Gathered from the Street Are Placed Back Into Circulation As Luxury Objects Published in 2025 by Sabian Press.

Martinez held the position of Editor-in-Chief of Glasstire from January 2024 to April 2025 and is director of Alabama Song Houston an experimental sound art space.

Martinez's work has been exhibited extensively: the Leather Archives & Museum (2023-2024); the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2006); Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami, FL (2004); Philadelphia Art Alliance (2003); Nexus Gallery, Philadelphia (1998, 1995); White Columns, New York, NY (1995). Over seventy group exhibitions since 1989, including Exit Art, NY (2006, 2005); Art Mur Gallery, Montreal, Canada (2005); Gallery Muu, Helsinki, Finland (2004); Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, Athens, GA (2004); Miami Art Central, Miami, FL (2004); Goliath Visual Space, Brooklyn, NY (2004); Samson Projects, Boston (2004); Thread Waxing Space, New York, NY (2000); Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (2000); Fabric Workshop & Museum, Philadelphia, PA (1998); Philadelphia Museum of Art (1998, 1997); Franklin Furnace, New York (1997); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (1996); Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas, Buenos Aires, Argentina (1995); ABC No Rio, New York (1992).

Books and catalogues Self-Portraits (Samson Projects, 2007) Garments Gathered from the Street Are Placed Back Into Circulation As Luxury Objects (Sabian Press, 2025)