Nina Mendez-Marti

  Nina Méndez Martí (Puerto Rico, 1983)
Multidisciplinary artist, born and raised in Puerto Rico who investigates the relationship between materiality and the female body through photography, self-portraits and performance. Nina Méndez Martí is an artist focused on the discipline of intervened photography that highlights personal writings scraped with sharp tools on the surface of the photographic emulsion. Likewise, she experiments with the intervention of nature on photographic paper, leaving the photographs outdoors for weeks so that the effects and changes of the weather affect them. As well as the hand stitching of details and framing of the photographs. Her international career includes exhibitions in Spain, Germany, France, Dubai, Singapore, Shanghai, New York, Miami, Chicago, Georgia, Puerto Rico, Dubai and Colombia.
Her extensive education has taken her from a Cum Laude Bachelor of Visual & Performing Arts at Syracuse University in 2006 to a Master in Documentary Photography at EFTI Photography School in Madrid, in 2008. In 2013 she received a Fondation de France Scholarship for study a summer at the Ecole Nationale Superieure de la Photographie in Arles, France. And next year, 2014, she completes her Masters in Fine Arts from the International Center of Photography – Bard College in New York. Nina has worked as an assistant and intern to important artists such as Spencer Tunick, Lauren Greenfield, Jane Evelyn Atwood, Mary Ellen Mark and Annie Leibovitz. As well as in the photo department of Rolling Stone Magazine in NYC.
Nina uses art as a tool for her own growth. In her works she questions her attachment to Puerto Rico with the need to grow professionally outside and inside her Island. She is continuously in a cyclical process of coming and going... with a intertwining of flying and being rooted at the same time. Her art questions her own environment, using self-portraiture, portraiture and body movement as a focus to break social taboos. She likewise explores the contradictions between childhood and adulthood, outer vs. inner image, and the blurred line between the mental, physical, and emotional. In her practice, the artist explores the insecurities and anger that she and other women experience due to the cultural norms of family, religion, and macho society. In her artwork, she writes, scratches and stitches personal stories related to emotions of pain, vulnerability, independence, and self-realization into the emulsion of photographic prints. These images are confessional, direct, crude and sometimes transgressive for a conservative society that has historically controlled the expression of women.
After Hurricane María, and its great effects on the island of Puerto Rico; Nina began to collaborate with nature, leaving photographic prints outdoors for weeks and months. Her idea is to obtain the imprint of rain, wind, sun and dirt on exposed photographic paper, thus evolving photographic paper into a weathered living object. This messy and unstable process she sees as nature obstructing, disrupting and interfering with our sense of stability. Then, the art created by the passage of time is sewn by hand with a needle and thread. Finally, she embodies her signature style by adding text, poems, sentences, meaningful words, or related phrases to personal stories in her own handwriting.
The project, titled ‘EntreCortada’, a series of Hurricane Maria-affected photographs found floating in four feet of dirty water flooding her new apartment in San Juan. The intense writing within these photographs is inspired by the 'Me Too Movement' and her own experiences of male chauvinist abuse. She also explores the ephemerality and the concepts of dematerialization, intermateriality, and transmateriality that have emerged in photographic, hybrid, analog, and digital experimentations. In 2019 this body of work received an honorable mention for Alternative Process Photography at the 13th Pollux Photography Awards and again in 2020 at the 14th Julia Margaret Cameron Awards, both under the umbrella of The Worldwide Photography Gala Awards.
In the series entitled ‘Mi Matriz No Me Define’ / ‘My Uterus Does Not Define Me'; her art explores the loss of her sexual and reproductive organs through a radical hysterectomy due to her complicated endometriosis. And she turns it into an awakening of her femininity, emphasizing how the lack of the female organ does not make her any less of a woman. But surprisingly, losing the physical representation of the feminine within her, at the beginning of the year 2020, has made her feel even more fulfilled as a woman and as an artist. This series was recognized by the research project "Photography and Illness" of the University of Puerto Rico and the renowned curator and professor Laura Bravo. As well as First Place in Self-Portrait Alternative Process Photography for the 15th Julia Margaret Cameron Awards.
In her most recent series of self-portraits she explores her rebirth as a woman during her recovery from her total hysterectomy occurring at the same time as a global pandemic. Using this time as an introspection and self discovery creation. She experiences the self-portraiture in union with nature, representing a growth from the hand of mother earth. The series features photographic prints sewn by hand, using a needle and thread. This artistic process represents the transformation of her body. Stitching photographs by hand is a meditative process, connecting her to her lineage; her seamstress grandmother and all the women ancestors who worked with her hands. Similarly, the series features her characteristic style of writing and drawing on her photographs by scratching. This detail of the writing is the influence of her artist and calligrapher mother who always inspired her to unite visual art with the art of letters. Through this process, she also regains control of her narrative, externalizing her hidden scars. The work presents the power to question, confront, rebel and learn what it means to accept and love yourself and your body. In 2021, this body of work received two first places, one second place and nine honorable mentions in Self-Portrait Photography, Fine Art, Women Seen by Women and Alternative Processes categories at the 15th Pollux Photography Awards and the 16th Julia Margaret Cameron Awards, both exhibited at the Sixth Biennial of Photography at the FotoNostrum gallery in Barcelona, Spain.
She exhibited a Self-Portrait of intervened photography alongside other international photographers at the ‘We The Women’ exhibition at the Women’s Pavilion of the grand Dubai Expo 2020 opening March 2022, also here creating and selling her first NFT.
Nina Méndez Martí focuses a large part of her professional time in the field of education. Nina is an Art Educator who has worked at the non-profit Studio in a School in New York, Museo del Barrio, Brooklyn Children's Museum, and the Children's Museum of Manhattan. In Puerto Rico she has worked with the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico, the Francisco Oller Museum of Art, and the Miramar Museum of Art and Design giving workshops to children, families adults and teachers. Her belief is that art and education go hand in hand and it is her mission to instill a love of art in future generations so that they have a lifelong tool of expression.
As an artist, what she is most proud of is the commission of eight large-scale murals that she created in 2019, with the support of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico and the National Endowment for the Arts, through the El MAC en el barrio cultural program. This project aims to transform distressed or ignored communities through the power of art and creative expression. These portraits are permanently installed in the streets of the Alto del Cabro community in Santurce, Puerto Rico, a small neighborhood full of wooden houses, some still devastated by Hurricane Maria. These murals were made in collaboration with the poet Nicole Cecilia Delgado and the residents of the community; each portrait includes handwritten text based on conversations with the resilient residents.
Her goal is to develop an experimental body of travel-based photographic portraiture work, with an educational component, culminating in books and exhibitions. Her artistic dream is to travel the world, especially South America and Europe, the homes of her ancestors, absorbing and creating art with women and girls from local communities. By learning about their unique and personal struggles and artistically exposing them to the world.