Please join us for a conversation between artist Daniel Joseph Martinez and Dr. Adrienne Edwards, the Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Professor of Practice at Arizona State University. The conversation takes place on the occasion of Martinez's solo exhibition States of Being at Marian Goodman Gallery New York.

Daniel Joseph Martinez was born in 1957 and raised in Los Angeles and graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in 1979. He studied with Michael Asher, John Baldassari and Douglas Hubler. From 1979-1981 he did post graduate studies with German artist Klaus Rinke. Throughout his career spanning five decades, Martinez has engaged in an interrogation of social, political, and cultural mores through artworks that have been described as nonlinear, asymmetrical, multidimensional propositions.

Operating with fluidity and as open-source manifestations not bound by any singular category, his works exist in an expanded field from the ephemeral to the solid. Martinez’s practice takes the form of text, sculpture, photography, painting, installation, robotics, performance, and public interventions to unapologetically question issues of collective identity, vision and visuality, and the fissures formed between the appearance and the perception of difference. Ongoing themes include philosophy, contamination, history, surveillance, violence, nomadic power, cultural resistance, war, dissentience, and systems of symbolic exchange, directed toward the precondition of politics coexisting as radical beauty. Their commonality is that they all address topics of race, class and sociopolitical boundaries present within American society.

Martinez is a Donald Bren Distinguished Professor of Art at the University of California at Irvine; he teaches in the Graduate Studies Program, New Genres and Critical & Curatorial Studies. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Dr. Adrienne Edwards is the Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Professor of Practice at Arizona State University. She recently curated Grace Rosario Perkins: Circles, Spokes, Zig Zags, Rivers, the artists' first museum exhibition in New York City from October 2025 to February 2026, and the blockbuster exhibition Edges of Ailey, which was presented from September 2024 to February 2025. Edwards has been a curator at the Whitney since 2018.  She co-curated Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept and enhanced the strength and vitality of the Museum's performance program. From 2021-2024, she also served as the Whitney’s Director of Curatorial Affairs. In 2022, she was the President of the International Jury of the 59th Venice Biennale, as well as a jury member for the 40th anniversary edition of Videobrasil in 2023 and the selection committee for the curatorship of the Berlin Biennale in 2018. Prior to the Whitney, Edwards served as curator of Performa in New York City and as Curator at Large for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis where she oversaw the Mellon Interdisciplinary Initiative. In addition to over fifty commissions in film, performance, and the visual arts, Edwards’s curatorial projects have also included the thematic intergenerational and interdisciplinary exhibition and catalogue Blackness in Abstraction presented at Pace Gallery (2016); the traveling exhibition and catalogue Jason Moran at the Walker Art Center, ICA Boston, and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2018–19); “Moved by the Motion: Sudden Rise” (2020), a series of performances based on a text co-written by Wu Tsang, boychild, and Fred Moten at the Whitney; Dave McKenzie's first solo museum exhibition in New York City The Story I Tell Myself and its pendant performance commission “Disturbing the View” (2021) at the Whitney; and the performance collective My Barbarian's twentieth anniversary exhibition and catalogue (2021–22) at the Whitney and ICA LA. She was part of the Whitney's core team for David Hammons’s public art monument Day’s End. Edwards has taught art history, performance, and visual studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York University, and the New School, and she has contributed essays to academic journals, artist monographs, group exhibition catalogues, and art magazines as well as other publications. Edwards holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University.