THIS WEEK”S MUSE
TO ACKNOWLEDGE AND CELEBRATE National Hispanic Heritage Month 2022, for the duration of our new exhibition we will be featuring related artists as our weekly muse.
MARÍA MARTÍNEZ-CAÑAS
“I am an artist who works with the medium of photography”
María Martínez-Cañas is a photographer who always wants to push the boundaries of the medium. She experiments with an array of techniques including montage and staining, and prints on tapestry, newsprint, and vellum as well as paper. As a result, she blurs the lines between photography and fine art.
Her family left Cuba in 1960—soon after the revolution that had destabilized and divided the country—when Martínez-Cañas was three months old. They settled in Puerto Rico and she grew up surrounded by art; her parents were collectors and there was music and visual artists in the home and the city. “I think that was a really strong influence in my life,” she said.
For her parents, photography was an important artform, but not only for its aesthetic merits. They had taken with them photographs of family and friends that were left behind in Cuba or had died. The people, their memories and the stories of her parents’ past were held in those images, helping ensure their heritage wasn’t forgotten. It was only years later that Martínez-Cañas understood how important the photographs were to her parents, not only as images but as physical relics of a lost life.
“I realize now the importance that photography had for them as a way to introduce our heritage and our roots. [Even] though we weren’t able to grow up in Cuba, we’re still able to feel extremely Cuban.”
It’s no surprise photography became the medium by which Martínez-Cañas learned to express herself, informed—in part at least—by seeing what those family photographs mean to her parents. Her first camera was the one her mother took with her out of Cuba.
“I see photography, in many ways, as the ability to tell a story. If you really look at a photo, if you study a photograph, you’re able to know so much about the people in the image and about the things inside the photograph.”
The photographs of her family’s past exemplify a wider artistic philosophy for Martínez-Cañas that identifies an object not only as a window on a past, but perhaps as something containing a part of that past. Using such objects in her work cements a connection.
Early in her career, studying in Spain in the mid 1980s, her work centered around her analysis of the maps Christopher Columbus used to discover Cuba. Today, for her exhibition Absences Revealed—currently showing at The Bass gallery in Miami—the work was in part provoked by two different relics. The chance finding of original 1920s wallpaper while renovating her home; and, following the death of her mother, the discovery of personal items kept from when they left Cuba more than sixty years before.
In both cases, the act of revealing and uncovering helps Martinez-Cañas create the connection by including some of these items within the exhibits. Actively engaging with the ideas of memory and loss by using the items as relics; to tell her story; to protect her heritage.
While so much of Martínez-Cañas’s professional identity is contained in her Cuban heritage, it’s surprising she has never been back since the family fled. “I would love to visit,” she said.
HAPPENING
Tuesday, October 25. 3:30–5:30pm
BAKING WITH LINDA: A CHILDREN’S CLASS – SPIDER CUPCAKES & OTHER HALLOWEEN HORRORS!
With Linda Sellner
Halloween food! Spooky Spider cupcakes with chocolate and vanilla dipped stick pretzel!
$38 – Member, $42 – Non-Member