Cristóbal Martínez, PhD is from Alcalde, New Mexico and is of the Genizaro, Pueblo, Manito and Chicano people in Northern New Mexico including Española, Abiquiu, Velarde, Pó t'síí pangeh, Embudo and Dixon. He is an artist, digital designer, publishing scholar, and Professor of Expanded Arts at Arizona State University.
Martínez co-founded the artist-hacker ensemble Radio Healer in 2003; joined the internationally acclaimed artist collective Postcommodity in 2009; and co-created, with post-Mexican artist-composer Guillermo Galindo, the experimental electronic music ensemble Red Culebra in 2018. Martínez has dedicated his life and career to interdisciplinary collaboration in contemporary art, and continues his work within these groups. In his collaborative and solo work, Martínez uses mixed media, digital media, and aesthetics to position generative metaphors intended to mediate complexity within diverse spatial, temporal, social, cultural, political, ecological, and economic contexts. He aspires to make poetic an idea-driven, propositional, and self-implicating art that re-imagines sites of contest, controversy, conflict, and consequence into those of generative public pedagogy, curiosity, and discourse.
Martínez has exhibited nationally and internationally, including: Contour Biennial 2011, Mechelen, BE; Adelaide International 2012, AUS; 18th Biennale of Sydney, AUS; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ; 2017 Whitney Biennial, NY; Art in General, NY; documenta14, Athens, GR and Kassel, DE; the 57th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, PA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Desert X, Coachella Valley, CA; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; San Francisco Art Institute, CA; LAXART, Los Angeles, CA; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Remai Modern Museum, Saskatoon, SK; Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA; and Repellent Fence at the U.S./Mexico border, Douglas, AZ and Agua Prieta, SON.
Cristóbal Martínez, is a 2023-2024 Latinx Artist Fellow in the collective Postcommodity, and a 2024 United States Artists Fellow.