Enrique Martínez Celaya

Enrique Martínez Celaya (b. 1964, Cuba) is the first Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts in the history of the University of Southern California and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, where he was also a Roth Family Distinguished Visiting Scholar.

Through his paintings, sculptures, installations, and writing, Martínez Celaya explores the exilic imagination, blending reality, myth, and memory to create poetic works that range from the semi-autobiographical to the resonantly universal. He describes his work as an open-ended, existential inquiry simultaneously addressing the "big gears of nature and the small gears of human experience."

His work is part of the collections of over sixty leading international museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

He is the author of nine books on art, philosophy, and poetry, including two volumes of his Collected Writings and Interviews (University of Nebraska Press: 2020 and 2010), tracing three decades of the artist’s creative thought. His work has also been the focus of several monographic publications, including two recent books by Hatje Cantz, Berlin: Martínez Celaya, SEA SKY LAND: towards a map of everything and Enrique Martínez Celaya and Käthe Kollwitz: Von den ersten und den letzten Dingen.

Martínez Celaya trained as an artist and physicist at Cornell University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He lives and works in Los Angeles.