Martine Gutierrez, self portrait. © Martine Gutierrez. Courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.
Martine Gutierrez’s work blurs the boundaries between performance, photography, and self-portraiture. Through constructed worlds and cinematic tableaus, she explores identity as both artifice and truth—intertwining personal heritage, mythology, and popular culture into reflections on belonging and transformation.
For her Wall at WAM commission at the Worcester Art Museum, Gutierrez will draw inspiration from religious artworks across the Museum’s collection and from cultures spanning centuries and continents. Known for creating elaborate photographic self-portraits using mannequins, handcrafted sets, and original costumes, Gutierrez will produce a new large-scale image that brings together references from these historical objects with elements of her own cultural heritage. The resulting work will explore how photography can reinterpret enduring themes of identity, transformation, and spirituality for contemporary audiences.
Gutierrez is the 12th artist featured in the Wall at WAM series since it began in 1998. The billboard-sized wall fills a 67-foot expanse on the second story of the Museum’s Renaissance Court. First Revelation of the Sovereign Queen by Martine Gutierrez is organized by Samantha Cataldo, Curator of Contemporary Art.
About the artist
Martine Gutierrez (born 1989, Berkeley, California) earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and has received several awards including most recently a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2025. In 2018, Gutierrez produced Indigenous Woman, a project in the form of 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.” This body of work has been widely praised and exhibited all over the world, including the 58th Venice Biennale. Her work has further been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among many other institutions, and has been collected by museums around the country including the Worcester Art Museum. 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. In addition to her artistic practice, Gutierrez is a published musician and has produced several commercial videos. Gutierrez lives and works in New York.
Contemporary art installations in common spaces at WAM are supported by the Fletcher Foundation, Larry and Marla Curtis, the Don and Mary Melville Contemporary Art Fund, the John M. Nelson Fund, and Marlene and David Persky.
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