Alum Featured in Exhibit Celebrating Photography by Cuban Women

María Martínez-Cañas BFA ’82 (Photography) is one of the artists featured in the Bailey Contemporary Artists (BaCA) exhibit Building a Feminist Archive: Cuban Women Photographers in the U.S. The exhibit features Cuban women artists from the 1970’s onward, a time when, according to BaCA’s website, a “Latino” identity in the U.S. began to form; the exhibit celebrates the contributions of these women in the context of the current cultural climate surrounding Latinx art. Building a Feminist Archive is curated by Aldeide Delgado, founder and director of Women Photographers International Archive.

Like all the artists in the BaCA exhibit, Martínez-Cañas created art in response to her political environment. Her family was affected by the Cuban Revolution and was forced to move to Puerto Rico when she was only three months old.

Martínez-Cañas eventually moved to Philadelphia to pursue her BFA in Photography at UArts (then the Philadelphia College of Art), and went on to complete an MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago. In her biography for the Smithsonian American Art Museum, she explains that her work has largely been about searching for an identity as a Cuban woman despite having no memories of Cuba herself. “I have always experienced a desire to belong to a ‛particular place,’” Martínez-Cañas commented. 

Martínez-Cañas’ collection titled Rebus + Diversions further explores her connection between the history of Cuba and a cultural identity. The collection was exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh until January 2020 and will be featured in an upcoming exhibit at the Art Museum of The Americas in Washington, D.C., in fall 2020. Martínez-Cañas has received many awards throughout her career, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (2016), a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1988) and a Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellowship (2014) in Umbertide, Italy. 

Other artists featured in Building a Feminist Archive: Cuban Women Photographers in the U.S. are Aurora de Armendi, Carlotta Boettcher, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Coco Fusco, Nereida García Ferraz, Silvia Lizama, Yali Romagoza, Gladys Triana and Juana Valdés.  

For more information about the exhibit, visit BaCa’s website.