Cristóbal Martínez


Cristóbal Martínez is a Chicano artist and the founder of Radio Healer, an indigenous hacker collective. He is a member of Postcommodity, a Southwest Native American Artist collective. His work featured in the 17th Whitney Biennial, , and the Sundance Film Festival.
He currently works as the head of the art department at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Education

Martínez attended Arizona State University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in studio art and painting in 2002. He remained at the university to earn a master's degree in media art in 2011 and a PhD in rhetoric, composition and linguistics in 2015.
He attended Arizona State University where he earned his bachelor's degree in studio art and painting in 2002. In 2003, he founded the Radio Healer. He then continued on to earn his master's degree

Radio Healer

Martínez founded the indigenous hacker collective Radio Healer in 2003, a year after completing his first degree at Arizona State University. The collective is made up of Martínez,Melissa S. Rex, Mere Martinez, Rykelle Kemp, Randy Kemp, Ashya Flint, Edgar Cardenas, and Devin Armstrong-Best. Together they create indigenous electronic tools from recycled from hacking, recycling, and adaptive reuse to perform indigenous ceremonies based on their imagination.
Their art consisted of moving tools, images, performances, and sounds that aided in creating metaphors to address the semiotic systems that they state are often misinterpreted. The purpose of their collective is to combat these misinterpretations by given audiences an opportunity to engage in re-imagined indigenous ceremonies. The collective hosts public performances, with the intent that the public will reflect on issues such as warfare, borders, mass surveillance, land use, socioeconomic issues, and historical amnesia. The collective was a former artist-in-residence at the Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix Arizona.

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Martínez founded Postcommodity, an interdisciplinary artist collective consisting of himself and Kade L. Twist. The collective's aim is to form metaphors to make sense of shared experiences in a contemporary environment, create productive conversations that go against social, political, and economic processes that ruining communities and ruining geographic areas.
Their work has exhibited in locations and events such as the Whitney Museum of American Art's 2017 Biennial.

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Do You Remember When? is an instillation art piece that was debuted and exhibited at the Arizona State University Art Museum. The artwork created a "spiritual, cultural and physical portal...from which emerges an Indigenous worldview engaging a discourse on sustainability". It was made from concrete slabs, exposed earth, light, and sound. The concrete slabs represented symbolized a trophy that honored the Indigenous scientific inventions in the Western scientific world. According to Kate Morris in the book Shifting Grounds, the artwork was considered to be site specific because "the customization of the piece through the inclusion of local indigenous voices carries much of the works meaning"