Coming to terms with the notion of place was one of the defining issues of the 1990s. It is a concern that continues to resonate for us today. How is it that we, as individuals (and members of a variety of communities), define and locate ourselves, charting our origins, relations, experiences, and desires, in a world characterized by endlessly shifting boundaries? How have changes over the last several decades, in the geo-political landscape and in the manner in which we travel, communicate, and conduct business in a global marketplace, affected the way we perceive and navigate public and private space?  In 1995 the French cultural anthropologist Marc Augé posited the notion of  "non-places," which he defined as one of the new norms of "supermodern" existence.  Supermodernity, as he described it in Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, had produced a variety of new conditions, principal among them the proliferation of a new, impersonal architecture of transit and impermanence---hotel chains, airports, super/mega-marts and, even since his publication, a vast global network of virtual spaces---that were failing to provide humanity with a sense of comfort, familiarity and, more importantly, stability. For Augé, if "place" was defined by identity, relation, and history, then "non-places" (which had no identity) could not be perceived as relational and historical. Non-places, therefore, frustrated traditional notions of space as well as confounded the individual sense of memory and history.2

   The desire to locate reality under these new conditions and map the history of human experience were vital imperatives for many visual artists working in the late 1980s and the decade of the 1990s. Charting origins, tracing identity, and recording the history of migrations and displacements were at the forefront of cultural production at this time. The creative community's emphasis on place and identity, which were clearly symptoms of a wider cultural phenomenon, were also unquestionably the result of the postmodern rethinking of  "center versus peripheries" and the heightened sense of multicultural awareness fostered in the late twentieth century. All these factors led to an inevitable focus on the notion of place. Several exhibitions in the 1990s, including "Mapping" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1994), "Topographies" at the Vancouver Art Gallery (1996), "Trade Routes: History and Geography" for the second Johannesburg Biennial in South Africa (1997), and the touring show "Cities on the Move: The Asian City in the Nineties" (1997), charted different aspects of this trend in the visual arts. Perhaps the most notable early exploration of the subject was "About Place: Recent Art of the Americas" at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995. Curated by Madeleine Grynzstejn, "About Place" presented sixteen diverse artists whose works manifested an "acute sense of place."3 For Grynzstejn, the emphasis on place was the result of many of the conditions of late twentieth century existence already noted, and "place" itself was defined as "the original, cultural, social, geographic, and/or political landscapes simultaneously occupied by the artist."4 Grynzstejn's interpretation, which was inspired by Blanchot, allowed for an individual and varied sense of the nature of locale that encompassed "the actual to the remembered or imagined" and the "intimate to the expansive."5

     Developed concurrently with the Art Institute show, the exhibition "Distemper: Dissonant Themes in the Art of the 1990s," which was co-organized by this author and Neal Benezra in 1996 for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,Washington, D.C., also considered the impact on recent art of major shifts in the geo-political environment, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissipation of the Soviet Bloc. In conceptualizing the show, the observations of cultural historian Andreas Huyssen were invoked. In the 1995 publication Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, Huyssen argued that late twentieth-century society was living through a dramatic transformation in the modern structure of time, which he saw as a result of many of these significant changes. Today, Huyssen's comments from the mid-1990s ring especially true, particularly since the events of this past September 11:

          "The twentieth-first century looms like a repetition: one of bloody nationalisms and tribalisms, of religious fundamentalism and intolerance that we thought had been left behind in some darker past. The increasing two-way interpenetration of First and Third worlds adds yet another dimension. Rather than moving together, if at different paces, into the future, we have accumulated so many non-synchronicities in our present that a very hybrid structure of temporality seems to be emerging."6

The crisis in temporality and the non-synchronous aspects of contemporary reality that Huyssen described were further accentuated in the later 1990s by the widespread applications of the internet and new communications technologies that have dramatically altered (and will continue to transform) the way we visualize and process information.

     The conditions of a post-technological, post-historical, post-ideological society undoubtedly informed a great deal of creative output over the last two decades. Yet well before curators, art critics, and cultural historians were analyzing these trends, artists were monitoring these shifts and responding to them, often intuitively. Some of these symptoms were perhaps more deeply felt and, even anticipated, by artists who had experienced the consequences of upheaval and displacement in their own lives. María Martínez-Cañas was one such artist. Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1960, Martínez-Cañas became an exile the year of her birth. Her family fled Cuba in the wake of Fidel Castro's assumption to power the year earlier. Spending most of her childhood and adolescence in Puerto Rico, Martínez-Cañas began to contend with the consequences of her involuntary migration at a tender age. With no memory of her homeland (other than the second-hand recollections acquired from her family), the young woman had to find a way process the non-synchronous aspects of her past with the realities of her present. The complexities of her journey were compounded by the fact that she lived in Puerto Rico, a Spanish-speaking island whose inhabitants also manifested a complicated sense of identity and conflicted relationship with the past and present.

     When Martínez-Cañas came to the mainland United States in 1978 to study art in Philadelphia, and later Chicago, her feelings of dislocation intensified as she found herself in a primarily English-speaking setting with a climate and attitude quite different from her Caribbean background. The resulting tensions began to express themselves in her art of the early 1980s. Although Martínez-Cañas' primary medium has always been photography, an important early video from 1984 considered (as the title of the work suggests) Un Problema de Identidad/A Problem of Identity. The video, which is seen here for the first time, featured the artist wearing a series of masks. This exploration inaugurated a search that became a central focus of her art throughout most of the late 1990s.  Many pieces from this time were also inspired by music. In The Concert Book, 1981, she translated a violin concerto into photography by printing a sparse, syncopated arrangement of graphic design elements and fragments of spliced photo-negatives across the surface of photographic paper. The untitled works from the "Fragment" series that followed (1981-83) were also characterized by a spare, minimal deployment of visual imagery. In these photographs, large areas of white space surround concentrations of photo-based content that detail parts of buildings, furniture, the landscape, and the human form. The spatial voids and cropped representations of reality seemed apt metaphors for the artist's fragmented memory. 

     Martínez-Cañas' early works were also informed by the poetic black-and-white compositions of the American photographer Harry Callahan (1912-1999), and in particular a work titled Weeds in the Snow, 1943. Callahan's subtle yet powerful works taught the young artist that photography could be more than "mere document" and could transcend the specifities of place and time such that "identity could be totally lost."7 Interested in the metaphoric potential of photography, Martínez-Cañas evolved in the succeeding years a signature working process that allowed her to fuse aspects of painting and photography, abstraction and representation, as well as explore the complexities associated with identity and exile. In 1984, she began to work with images derived from maps. In the "Map Series" from that year, she brought together actual documents (maps and family photographs) and loosely arranged them on a table in the manner of collage, which she then photographed in color. These investigations led to an application for a Fulbright-Hays grant, which she was awarded in 1985. The grant allowed her to travel to Spain to conduct research and ultimately develop a project that would set the tone for her artistic production over the next decade. In Spain, where she felt naturally more at ease in a society that shared her language and aspects of her culture, she discovered the Archivo General de Indias in Seville. In the Archives were thousands of papers and maps that documented the Spanish conquest of the Americas, and in particular the Spanish colonization of Cuba. She was especially drawn to representations of the island and the colonial city plans of Havana from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, which she rigorously studied and photographed.

After completing her fellowship, she settled in Miami in 1986. Her relocation further fueled her desire to reconnect with her lost homeland. Working with the rich source material she had found in Spain, Martínez-Cañas began to create works such as Plano de Ciudad/City Plan and Muralla, Guerrero y Fortaleza/City Wall, Battlement and Fort, both 1986-87, that combined details from these archival images with the artist's own photographic collection of family snapshots and travel pictures, as well as images of pre-Columbian artifacts, photographs of Spanish-style architecture, and religious documents shot from books. Works such as Tierra/Land, 1990, and Con la Habana del Fondo/With Havana in theBackground, 1991, eloquently reveal an unstable and invented sense of place.  Here, images are sharply cropped, overlayed, and spun off center creating jigsaw puzzle fragments of information; Tormenta deImágenes/Storm of Images, 1990, is a particularly good example. The juxtapositions are often disorienting as the past merges with the present creating new unbridled histories of possibility. These works, as the artist explained, helped her express her own sense of exile: "Throughout the years and with my photographs I have tried to reinvent the past. To search, and deal with, a personal identity. My photographs are events that transcend one another as a never ending chain from the past to the present."8 Giving form to a variety of personal and historical non-synchronicities, Martínez-Cañas forged a mode of expression that both complicated and celebrated her hybrid, transcultural identity. Her working process (cutting amberlith and splicing photonegatives to create a master negative from which to print) also curiously anticipated a digital age approach to visualizing and processing byte streams of information. The irony was that rather scanning and composing images directly on the computer, Martínez-Cañas constructed her negative template completely by hand throughout the 1990s. Only recently has she begun to work in digital modes in concert with her conventional working process.

     Martínez-Cañas' fascination with maps was an interest shared by a number of artists of her generation. The large map paintings by Guillermo Kuitca from the late 1980s and his ghostly canvases of the 1990s inspired by family trees and the floor plans of communal architecture (apartment buildings and cemeteries) similarly fused historical fact with personal fictions to create beautiful, abstract evocations of the very conundrum inherent in describing place. For both artists, who recognized that maps were in themselves projections of a particular society's world view--essentially abstractions of reality shaped by human perception and the desire to describe natural resources, borders, and a hierarchy of geographic and political relations--the map was at once encumbering and potentially liberating as an expressive form. Particular maps, such as the map of Cuba, were fraught with additional symbolic and emotional associations for many Cuban-born artists such as Martínez-Cañas who emerged in the Cuban post-revolutionary era. Her early map pieces, such as Territorio Cubano/Cuban Territory, 1988, show the island of Cuba prominently. Spikey borders surrounding the image and the map suggest impenetrable fences and details of a fortified wall bisect the island. All underscore the divisions along family and political lines that resulted from the Cuban revolution.

     The specificity of the maps in Martínez-Cañas's early pieces became less obvious over time as she transformed the geographic details of Cuba into her own personal system of describing and mapping. The scale of her photos also began to vary, as did the content and graphic imagery, which became increasingly denser and more complex in subsequent series. The various "totem" series from 1989-90 and the "Serie Negra (Black Series)" from 1992 were larger, often elongated pieces inspired by the Afro-Cuban symbolism and iconography of the Cuban surrealist painter Wifredo Lam (1902-1982). Martínez-Cañas' evocation of Lam's style and subject matter was a way to further engage with aspects of Cuban nationalism and the island's rich transcultural heritage. Concurrently she made “Quince Sellos Cubanos/Fifteen Cuban Stamps”, 1991-92, a series of exquisite prints inspired by a collection of stamps from pre- and post-revolutionary Cuba. Commenting on her use of the stamp, the artist explained: "If a map is used to find and locate, then a stamp is used to deliver (send; separate) and to bring closer (reconciliation). In this way, these stamps became an essential instrument in coming closer to my Cubanness."9 For the next several years, Martínez-Cañas continued in this exploratory vein with related series inspired by a variety of historical documents. In "Imagen Escrita" from 1994-95, she printed her images on antique manuscript paper and incorporated original merchant letters, insurance and marine documents. Recalling the artist's first "Map" series from 1984, this elegant series indicated that the artist was beginning to come full circle on the notion of mapping.  It was in Años Continuos/Continuous Years, her major public commission for Terminal D of the Miami International Airport, that the culmination of the "map" series--a tremendously important body of work in her oeuvre--was dramatically realized. In this tour de force composition, which was translated into a monumental wall of etched glass, Martínez-Cañas synthesized the iconography she had developed over the last decade into a resounding cascade of density and transparency. Standing before it, visitors are at once awed and transported to a variety of mythical, historical, real and imagined locales.

     Curator Terence Pitts once aptly described the explosive concentration of imagery in Martínez-Cañas' works:  “. . . all of these chaotic and contradictory elements are held together in an intuitive balance, in a sort of triumphant, artistic juggling act that reflects the artist's hard-won but tenuously held vision of the way in which history and individual destinies intersect."10 Forever poised in a state of irreconcilability, Martínez-Cañas's "maps" of the 1990s do at times give in the impression that they could spin out of control and rearrange themselves at any moment. At other times they seem suspended in states of harmonious balance. That flexibility (and generosity, really) allows each of us as individuals to localize ourselves within her art. While Martínez-Cañas has recently evolved her work in exciting new directions unrelated to specific notions of place and mapping, her profound exploration of self continues as she turns to the residues of her own body, such as saliva, to create lyrical, ephemeral impressions related to even more basic codes of origin, our biology.

1. Maurice Blanchot, "Sleep, Night," in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982) 26.

2. Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995). I am indebted to the late Juan Muñoz for the introduction to Augé's work.

3. Madeleine Grynzstejn, About Place: Recent Art of the Americas (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1995) 10.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995) 8.

7. Author's conversation with the artist, November 21, 2001, Miami.

8. María Martínez-Cañas, María Martínez-Cañas: Encounters 1 (Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, 1991) n.p.

9. Artist quoted in Elisa Turner, "María Martínez-Cañas," Latin American Art 5, no. 1 (June 1993) 86.

10. Terence Pitts, María Martínez-Cañas: Encounters 1, n.p.

Olga M. Viso is the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution © 2002