Art
By Christine Byrd
of Social Change
Two more UCI faculty and alumni receive Guggenheim Fellowships When a shiny sculpture of a rabbit by the most commercially successful living artist sold for a record-breaking $91 million at auction earlier this year, UCI art professor Daniel Joseph Martinez shrugged. “We don’t remember the people who sold the most,” he says. “We remember the people who changed the trajectory of ideas.” Two UCI artists were recently honored for doing just that. Martinez, a UCI professor for 29 years, and alumna Hồng-An Trương ’08, were among the 168 artists, writers and scholars selected from 3,000 applicants to receive The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship this year, recognizing both “prior achievement and exceptional promise.”
“To be in the legacy of all of the artists and scholars who have received the Guggenheim over the years, that’s an extraordinary thing,” says Martinez. “It’s not only an acknowledgment of my life’s work, but an encouragement to go further and deeper into that work. In fact, it allows for a new kind of optimism.” It was optimism that brought Martinez to UCI as a young artist in 1990, recruited with a handful of other new faculty — all women or people of color — who promised to reshape the art department into a socially conscious, Image: “Freedom Without Love,” from UCI art professor Daniel Joseph Martinez’s 2004 series, “If Only God Had Invented Coca Cola, Sooner! Or, The Death of My Pet Monkey” 11
