Martine Gutierrez and Cal photographer Ethan James Green have been friends since they were “fashion babies”, newly arrived in New York in the mid-2010s and “figuring out how to do this” and make it as professional artists.
Part of a close-knit group working in fashion and art, Green, a model turned photographer, and Gutierrez, a multimedia artist, have collaborated numerous times. Gutierrez performed at the 2019 launch party for Green’s first book, Young New York, a striking portrait collection featuring diverse, urban millennials. And she appears in his second book, Bombshell, published this year.
Their self-portraits have also appeared together in a New York three-person show with artist Sam Penn. The show was described by David Velasco, former editor-in-chief of art magazine Artforum, as “images by three beautiful young makers who move in and out of one another’s lives”.
Given their intertwined experiences, it’s perhaps no surprise that Green chose Gutierrez to be part of the Cal.
“Today we play supermodel for Pirelli,” she adds jokingly about the shoot, noting that Green “knows how to make an image. His eye knows what it wants”.
Gutierrez’s still photography, film and performance art have been exhibited all over the world. Her art seeks to explore identity by questioning cultural tropes relating to gender, class, heritage and power. Acting as artist, subject, director and muse, she draws on her experience as a first-generation artist of indigenous descent and a non-binary trans woman.
Born in California, she studied at Rhode Island School of Design and received attention for her first solo show in 2013. It featured Real Dolls, photographs she had taken of herself posing as life-size sex dolls in domestic settings, and Martine Part I-IX , a nine-part, semi-autobiographical film reflecting on personal transformation.
In 2018, Gutierrez produced Indigenous Woman, an art publication in the style of a glossy fashion magazine for which she played model, stylist, photographer and editor. She described it as “the celebration of Mayan Indian heritage, the navigation of contemporary indigeneity and the ever-evolving self-image”.
Gutierrez was the youngest artist to exhibit at the Venice Biennale, 'May You Live In Interesting Times' curated by Ralph Rugoff in 2019. She exhibited self-portraits from Indigenous Woman including images from her Body En Thrall and Demons series.
And in 2021, she created ANTI-ICON, a Public Art Fund project to be exhibited in 300 bus shelters in New York City, Chicago and Boston. She photographed herself dressed as radical historical and mythological figures from Aphrodite to the Queen of Sheba to question often inflexible definitions of race and gender.
From 2022-2023 her tongue-in-cheek billboard 'Supremacy' exhibited outside the Whitney Museum of American Art across from The High Line, commissioned by the Whitney intandem with a live performance titled 'Supremacy: Corporate Retreat' where the artist dominated the museums board of directors in front of a live audience.
