The complexity of Cuban-American identity underlies much of Martínez-Cañas’s early photography as she probed the conceptual geography of her family and native country in exile. In the series Fragment Pieces (1981-1982), which spanned the conclusion of her studies at the Philadelphia College of Art and her first year at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, autobiography is abstracted through image and sign. In this work, Martínez-Cañas combined 2??-inch negatives—details of trees on the property of her mother’s house in Miami, the cradle of Cuban America—with marks that she scratched onto the surface of the print. While suggestive of the lines of a polygraph test or an electrocardiogram, the marks reference her abiding interest in music and aptitude for visual listening, seen also in a book that she made a year earlier based on her graphic response to a violin concerto. The three horizontal patterns in Fragment Pieces have a personal source in her father’s oscilloscope, a device that visualizes sound, and the memories of the musical salons he held during her childhood in Puerto Rico. Martínez-Cañas exhibited thirteen silver-gelatin prints from the Fragment Pieces series alongside examples from the Map Series at the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America in 1982 at the invitation of José Gómez Sicre, who declared her already a “highly original artist of the lens.” “The ‘fragment pieces’ are the conclusion of earlier work,” she wrote on the occasion of the exhibition. “In this process I relate abstract patterns, shapes, and forms, combining them with conventional images that are torn apart. By doing this I am exposed to a polarity: tradition-abstraction. The ‘fragment pieces’ are light drawings done by hand gestures; they represent a fragment of human energy.”
María Martínez-Cañas was born in Havana in 1960 and left Cuba that same year with her family, who settled in Puerto Rico four years later. She began to work with a Polaroid Swinger camera in 1968 and held her first exhibition at Galería Aboy in San Juan in 1977. At the Philadelphia College of Art (1978-1982), she began to experiment with photography and created Fragment Pieces and The Map Series, which were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America (now AMA) in 1982. She received a scholarship for graduate study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1982-1984), where she worked under Barbara Crane. The recipient of a Fulbright-Hays grant in 1985, Martínez-Cañas moved to Spain and produced her first negatives based on maps of colonial Cuba, which she discovered in libraries and archives in Madrid, Seville, and Valladolid. In 1988, she was awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the CINTAS Foundation. Cuba and the conditions of exile remained her principal point of reference until 1996, acknowledged in the series Totems Blancos (based on work by Wifredo Lam) and Totems Negros, which splice together imagery of the natural world, pre-Hispanic civilization, and Spanish conquest. Her large-scale work Años Continuos, commissioned by Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places, was installed at Miami International Airport in 1996. Martínez-Cañas created her first Diazo photograms, Traces of Nature, in 1999 and experimented with computer-generated imagery for the series Hortus (2001) and Naturalia (2002). The Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale organized a retrospective of her work in 2002. Later series such as Lies (2005), Adaptation (2006), Tracing (2007), and Duplicity as Identity (2008-2009) questioned the limits and veracity of the photographic medium, eliding her autobiographical past with the photographic archive of José Gómez Sicre, now in her possession.
