Daniel Joseph Martinez named speaker for second annual Lenhardt Lecture at Phoenix Art Museum

Apr, 02, 2019

Special Events and Programs

Daniel Joseph Martinez named speaker for second annual Lenhardt Lecture at Phoenix Art Museum

Internationally renowned artist will present a public lecture on May 2, 2019

PHOENIX (April 2, 2019) – On May 2, 2019, Phoenix Art Museum will present renowned artist Daniel Joseph Martinez as the speaker for the Museum’s second annual Lenhardt Lecture, a key component of the Dawn and David Lenhardt Contemporary Art Initiative. A conceptual artist who has represented the United States in 11 biennials around the world, Martinez is known for his experimental approach and poignant artworks that engage with topics of race, class, identity, and sociopolitical boundaries in the United States. This year’s Lenhardt Lecture will feature the Los-Angeles based artist’s lecture entitled “a new power is rising. the post human will inherit the earth.” The lecture is open to the public and will begin at 7 pm on May 2, 2019 in the Museum’s Whiteman Lecture Hall. Tickets are $10, with discounts for Museum Members.

“We are delighted to welcome Daniel Joseph Martinez to Phoenix as the speaker for this year’s Lenhardt Lecture,” said Amada Cruz, the Sybil Harrington Director and CEO of Phoenix Art Museum. “Through the ongoing generosity of Dawn and David Lenhardt, the Museum continues to bring some of the most innovative and significant contemporary artists working today to our community, helping establish Phoenix Art Museum as a nationally recognized destination for contemporary art. We are excited to present a lecture by Martinez and introduce Valley audiences to his distinct practice and body of work.”

The Museum hosted the inaugural Lenhardt Lecture in 2018 and welcomed New-York based artist Jim Hodges (b. 1957) as the speaker. This year’s Lenhardt Lecture will present Martinez (b. 1957), a Los Angeles-based artist whose work is found in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (N.Y.); The Museum of Modern Art (N.Y.); and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Texas); among many others. Martinez has presented work in 11 biennials worldwide, including the Venice Biennale (1993), the Whitney Biennial (1993, 2008), the Cairo International Biennale (2006), the Moscow Biennial (2007), the Berlin Biennial (2010), the Istanbul Biennial (2011), and the Lyon Biennial in France (2013). He has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including three National Endowment of the Arts Individual Artist Fellowships, The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, a United States Artists Grant, the Berlin Prize, the Cisneros Lifetime Achievement Award, the Career Achievement Award presented at the Hammer Museum’s 2018 Biennial, Made in L.A., and, most recently, the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship.

“The Lenhardt Lecture is designed to expose our community to contemporary artists who are making a significant and lasting impact on the art world, and Daniel Joseph Martinez is doing just that,” said David Lenhardt, a member of the Museum’s Board of Trustees. “Throughout his career, he has continuously created artworks that reflect some of the most pressing social and cultural issues of our time, and Dawn and I are thrilled to welcome him as this year’s speaker.”

With a career spanning four decades, Martinez experiments with a wide range of media, including text, sculpture, photography, painting, installation, robotics, performance, and public interventions, and his artworks often address themes such as violence, religion, contamination, history, surveillance, war, post humanism, artificial intelligence, and time travel. For the 2006 Cairo International Biennale, Martinez represented the United States in the American Pavilion and created The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster and Triumphal, featuring a life-sized android that burst into epileptic episodes as directed by a computer. Inspired by Blade Runner (1982), the commissioned installation explores how human intelligence and self-determination have evolved, or devolved, in the age of information technology.

“Martinez approaches every project with intellectual ferocity and a genuine belief that art can form the basis of cultural ethics,” said Gilbert Vicario, the Museum’s Selig Family Chief Curator, who served as the U.S. Commissioner for the 2006 Cairo International Biennale. “Within the unique cultural and social context of the Cairo Biennale, The Fully Enlighted Earth successfully conveyed the essence of his practice with technological and creative innovation.”

The artist’s most celebrated work, however, remains a piece commissioned for the 1993 Whitney Biennial that interrogates race and identity in the United States and illustrates how Martinez continually pushes boundaries to create art that is surprising, evocative, and uncompromising. Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture) or Overture con claque – Overture with Hired Audience Members (1993) consists of metal tags that were worn by every Biennial attendee to serve as the museum’s admission badges. Collectively, they read, “I can’t. Imagine. Ever Wanting. To Be. White.”

The Lenhardt Lecture engages Valley audiences with some of the most acclaimed contemporary artists in the world and is a key component of the Dawn and David Lenhardt Contemporary Art Initiative. Made possible through the generosity of the Arizona-based Lenhardt family, the initiative aims to deepen the Museum’s commitment to contemporary art through various programs and, along with the annual Lenhardt Lecture, includes the Lenhardt Emerging Artist Acquisition Fund, the Museum’s first fund designed specifically to collect works by next-generation contemporary artists; the Lenhardt Emerging Artist Lecture Series, aimed at introducing Valley audiences to emerging contemporary artists on a national scale; and the recently named Dawn and David Lenhardt Gallery, designated for the presentation of contemporary art, including works acquired with funds from the Lenhardt Emerging Artist Acquisition Fund, loans from national and local collectors, and a rotating series of artworks from the Lenhardts’ own collection.

For interviews or to request more information about the Dawn and David Lenhardt Contemporary Art Initiative, contact the Marketing and Communications Office of Phoenix Art Museum at 602.257.2105 or margaree.bigler@phxart.org.

About Daniel Joseph Martinez

Daniel Joseph Martinez (b. 1957) was born and raised in Los Angeles and graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in 1979. Throughout his career, Martinez has engaged in an interrogation of social, political, and cultural mores. His practice is media fluid, taking the form of text, sculpture, photography, painting, installation, robotics, performance, and public interventions, and his artworks operate as open-source manifestations unbound by any singular category, extending from the ephemeral to the solid. Spanning four decades and addressing topics of race, class, identity, and sociopolitical boundaries present within American society, Martinez’s body of work unapologetically questions issues of the politics of race, free will, human nature, personal and collective identity, vision and visuality, and the fissures formed between the appearance and the perception of difference through themes such as contamination, history, surveillance, violence, nomadic power, cultural resistance, war, dissentience, time travel, post humanism, artificial intelligence, machine intelligence, quantum physics, interdimensional travel, and systems of symbolic exchange, directed toward the precondition of politics coexisting as radical beauty.

Martinez has represented the United States in 11 biennials worldwide, including the Venice Biennale (1993), Cairo International Biennale (2006) Istanbul Biennial (2011), Berlin Biennial (2010), California Biennial (2008), Lyon Biennial in France (2013), and the Whitney Biennial (1993, 2008). He has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including three National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowships, an individual Artist Fellowship from the Getty Center, an Alpert Award in the Arts, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the Flintridge Foundation Fellowship, and the Career Achievement Award honoring brilliance and resilience in conjunction with the Hammer Museum’s Biennial, Made in L.A., in 2018. His work can be found in public collections across the United States, including the Whitney Museum of American Art (N.Y.); The Museum of Modern Art (N.Y.); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (Calif.); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (Calif.); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Calif.); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, (Texas); and more.

Also a co-founder of Deep River and LA><Art and a member of multiple non-profit boards, Martinez is the subject of five monographs and is currently collaborating with critical theorist Juli Carson on a new book based on his residency In Bellagio. Martinez is the Donald Bren Distinguished Professor of Art at the University of California at Irvine, where he teaches in the Graduate Studies Program, New Genres Area and Critical & Curatorial Studies. He lives and works in the Crenshaw District in South Los Angeles. For more information on Daniel Joseph Martinez, visit robertsprojectsla.com.

About Phoenix Art Museum

Phoenix Art Museum has provided access to visual arts and educational programs in Arizona for nearly 60 years and is the largest art museum in the southwestern United States. Critically acclaimed national and international exhibitions are shown alongside the Museum’s permanent collection of nearly 20,000 works of American, Asian, European, Latin American, modern and contemporary art, and fashion design. The Museum also presents festivals, a comprehensive film program, live performances, and educational programs designed to enlighten, entertain, and stimulate visitors of all ages. Visitors also enjoy vibrant photography exhibitions through the Museum’s landmark partnership with the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. To learn more about Phoenix Art Museum, visit phxart.org, or call 602.257.1880.