ASU alum combines electronics, music and Mason jars

Herberger Institute grad Cristóbal Martínez (BA, Studio Art, 2002; BFA, Painting, 2002; MA, Media Arts & Sciences, 2011) plans to use a $5,000 artist research and development grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts to expand and reinvent the artists’ collective he directs at the Pueblo Grande Museum.

Two other Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts alums also received artist research and development grants for 2016 from the commission: Carla Keaton (BFA, Painting, 2009) and M. Jenea Sanchez (BFA, Intermedia Art, 2007; MFA, Intermedia Art 2011).

A digital media artist who lives in Mesa, Martínez leads Radio Healer. He describes it as an indigenous electro-acoustic performance of experimental music composed for, and played on, traditional and electronic indigenous instruments.

Radio Healer’s members are all Chicano or Native American artists.

Martínez is also a member of the Indigenous interdisciplinary arts collective Postcommodity, which has collaborated with the ASU Art Museum several times, most recently in the fall of 2015, when Postcommodity erected a two-mile “repellent fence” of tethered balloons that bisected Arizona’s border with Mexico.