Marta María Pérez, born in 1959 in Havana, Cuba, trained in painting at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, graduating in 1979, and later completed her studies at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana in 1984. During Cuba’s Special Period she shifted decisively toward photography, emerging as one of the most significant women artists of her generation to engage Afro-Cuban religious traditions through an explicitly feminine and personal lens.
Her signature works are black-and-white self-portraits that function as static performances. She isolates parts of her own body—torso, limbs, hands—rarely revealing her face, and places these fragments against ethereal white backgrounds to create a sense of ritual detachment and introspection. Symbolic elements drawn from Santería and Palo Monte—macutos (protective charms), candles, oars, earth, ropes, and ritual vessels—are arranged with deliberate precision, turning each image into a contemporary offering or omen. Titles function as poetic incantations, linking mythological references to lived experience.
Early series such as Para concebir (To Conceive, 1985–1986), produced during her pregnancy, powerfully address maternity, fertility, protection, and the physical and spiritual weight of creation. In Macuto (1992) she holds a charm over her heart, symbolizing both devotion and the fierce desire to shield her twin children. Many photographs deliberately transgress gender norms and religious taboos, asserting female agency within spiritual systems historically dominated by male authority.
Relocating to Mexico in the mid-1990s, first to Monterrey and later Mexico City, allowed greater international visibility while deepening her reflections on exile, cultural continuity, and belonging. Her practice has been exhibited extensively, including in the Havana Biennial and São Paulo Biennale, as well as solo and group shows at leading institutions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Her photographs reside in prominent private and public collections worldwide.
Through an austere yet emotionally charged visual language, Marta María Pérez has created a singular body of work in which the intimate and the ancestral converge. By placing her own body at the center of ritual and memory, she has carved an enduring space for feminist inquiry within Latin American art, transforming personal narrative into universal statements on identity, spirituality, and resilience.