NEW YORK.- A mid-career retrospective of work by abstract painter Mario Martinez (Pascua Yaqui) will open on Saturday, Jan. 29 at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York. It is part of a series of four similar retrospectives called "New Tribe: New York," that focuses on Native American contemporary artists who live and work in New York City. The Martinez exhibition will close on May 8, 2005.

One of the foremost Native American abstract painters, Martinez's densely layered surfaces and rich palettes connect cosmic images, abstractions of animal and plant life and Yaqui traditions. This exhibition features 15 works done in the last 25 years presented alongside six new works. The artist also chose several significant Yaqui objects and images from the museum's collection to include in this installation.

The series will continue with installations by Spiderwoman Theater (Kuna/Rappahannock), May 21 – Sept. 4, 2005; Alan Michelson (Mohawk), Sept. 17, 2005 – Jan. 1, 2006 and Lorenzo Clayton (Navajo/Diné), Jan. 14, 2005 – Apr. 9, 2006.

"New York City is home to the highest urban concentration of Indian people in the United States," said W. Richard West (Southern Cheyenne), director of the National Museum of the American Indian. "Presenting the works of these contemporary artists, to their fellow New Yorkers, emphasizes and affirms the contributions of Native peoples to the cultural life of this great city.

"The concept of the new tribe describes not only the urban Indian experience but how it is articulated by incisive works and methods by artists expressing their lives in a complex and contradictory world," said Gerald McMaster, exhibition curator and the museum's deputy assistant director of cultural resources. "These artists are all complex individuals who have developed within highly charged social, historical and political frameworks. They are a new tribe working and enjoying life, through an intercultural perspective from the margins."

Mario Martinez is from Penjamo, the smallest of six Yaqui settlements, in Scottsdale, AZ. After an early art career in San Francisco, he moved to New York City in 2000. He received his bachelor's degree from Arizona State University in Tempe and his master's of fine arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute. His work has been exhibited in 2003 in a one-person show at the Cakewalk Gallery in Phoenix. Other group exhibitions include: "Who Stole the Tee Pee?" at the National Museum of the American Indian, New York; "AlieNation" at the American Indian Community House Gallery and the Contemporary Artists Federation Group Show in Saitama, Japan. In 2000, he was a visiting professor of art at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and in 2001 he received the Native Artist in Residence Fellowship from the National Museum of the American Indian.