Brandeis Stories

January 4, 2024

The Rose Art Museum has named Mexican artist Noé Martínez the 2024 Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence.

Since 2002, the Perlmutter Residency has been part of the Rose Art Museum’s longstanding tradition of promoting emerging artists of extraordinary talent whose work addresses contemporary issues of vital urgency.

A multidisciplinary artist, Martínez’s art addresses colonialism and its brutal impact on indigenous peoples and cultures through various media, including drawing, sculpture, video, and performance art. Martínez’s residency will coincide with the exhibition, Noé Martínez: The Body Remembers, March 13–June 16, 2024, organized by Gannit Ankori, Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator, with independent curator and scholar Circe Henestrosa.

Supported by ethnographic techniques and archival research, Martínez explores the interconnected strata of art, body, history, and living memory. His exhibition at the Rose Art Museum explores his family’s Huastecan heritage within the context of Mexico’s repressive colonial histories to resurrect, mourn, and memorialize his indigenous culture. He has stated: “I identify as Huasteco, one of the cultures most severely dismembered by the mercantile trade system of the viceroyship and, at the same time, one of the most forgotten by the official story or academic studies of Mexico.”

Noé Martínez: The Body Remembers presents art as ritual and memorial. As an artist, Martínez attempts to locate traces of his ancestors’ past within his own body. The enveloping installation consists of life-size drawings that wrap the gallery's walls, embracing a circle of over a dozen clay figurative vessels fashioned in the style of pre-Hispanic art. The show includes a large-scale video projection of a ceremonial dance—utilizing body, sound, and movement to invoke Martínez’s ancestors, their histories, and traumas. The Body Remembers serves as an act of shamanistic healing for past and present wounds.

“Noé Martínez’s residency and exhibition will provide an opportunity to reexamine the history of colonialism in the Americas from the perspective of a descendant of the colonized people. His artistic practice is a way to commune with his ancestors and memorialize a bloody history of enslavement, dispersal, and oppression,” says Ankori.

“The work is also a call to reflect on similar horrors that still plague our world. We are grateful to Ruth Ann Perlmutter for the legacy she and her husband Nathan established, allowing us to bring artists like Martínez to campus. Like the Perlmutters, we believe art is essential to expanding our knowledge and understanding of the human condition across the globe.”

A public reception to celebrate the opening of Noé Martínez: The Body Remembers will be held on Wednesday, March 13, 2024, with additional programs that will activate the artist’s show and his residency at the Rose Art Museum. The Rose Art Museum acquired Martínez’s mixed media work Árbol. Las presencias dormidas (2020) in 2021, the work is currently on view in the museum’s permanent collection show, re: collections, Six Decades at the Rose Art Museum.