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 presents First Revelation of the Sovereign Queen, a large-scale installation that brings together photography, painting, collage, and sculptural elements. The composition nods to art historical influences that can be found throughout the galleries surrounding the Wall at WAM. The dramatic lighting and dynamic composition of Gutierrez’s self-portrait evoke European Baroque painting, while her reclining pose is a trope seen throughout art history beginning with ancient mythological goddesses. The scenes of nature flanking the sovereign queen were painted by Gutierrez in a style influenced by 16th-century Italian paintings and traditional East Asian ink paintings. Translation, Gutierrez says, is at the heart of her image-making: “Taking one visual language and making it speak differently, that transformation is in essence the mechanism of art’s history that can also be seen in the galleries at WAM—the translation of visual dialects.”
In her work, Gutierrez considers the archetypical framing of a woman’s lifecycle—the triad of maiden, mother, and crone—and presents her vision for a fourth archetype: the sovereign woman (or the queen). Possessing wisdom and experience beyond the youthful maiden, the sovereign woman represents the role of leadership. Gutierrez notes that, unlike the mother, the sovereign is no longer defined by responsibility to others nor patriarchal constructs of caregiving, and unlike the crone, she is not withdrawing from worldly roles but stepping into them with new authority. The sovereign’s role is not defined by age, but by her own autonomy.
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 been exhibited and collected by institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others, 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.
After Hours: First Revelation of the Sovereign Queen sponsored by:
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