Beauty and Demons at the Modern

Martine Gutierrez’s photographs and videos exploring gender, race, class, and sexuality, as well as the conventional ideals of beauty and identity as a social construct mount Friday, November 8 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth as part of the FOCUS series. Highlighting emerging artists, at the end of each FOCUS exhibition, the members of the Director’s Council vote to recommended a work for acquisition by the Modern, contributing to the museum’s permanent collection and shaping its cultural footprint.

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Martine Gutierrez was born in 1989 in Berkeley, California, and currently lives in Brooklyn. She earned a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Her most ambitious project to date, Indigenous Woman, 2018, is a glossy, 146-page publication that closely mirrors Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine in form and production. Here, Gutierrez assumes the role of editor, writer, model, designer, ad executive, and photographer, with fictional advertising and high-fashion spreads where the artist continually reinvents herself throughout its pages. 

One section of the publication features her Demons series, in which Gutierrez assumes the role of Aztec deities—such as the goddess of beauty, Xochiquetzal—that were later referred to as “demons” after the Spanish conquest. 

As the artist states, “Indigenous Woman marries the traditional to the contemporary, the native to the post-colonial, and the marginalized to the mainstream in the pursuit of genuine selfhood, revealing cultural inequities along the way. This is a quest for identity. Of my own specifically, yes, but by digging my pretty, painted nails deeply into the dirt of my own image I am also probing the depths for some understanding of identity as a social construction.” For her FOCUS exhibition, the artist will present photographs from the Indigenous Woman series.

FOCUS: Martine Gutierrez is on view November 8–January 12.