Maria Veronica San Martin (b. 1981, Chile) is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist whose work involves uncovering and honoring histories that systems of oppression have erased, focusing on state violence in her native country, and its lasting impact. Through archives, printmaking, artist books, performance, installations and socially engaged education, she creates participatory spaces where collective memory is rebuilt through the embodied practice creating spaces that foster remembrance, resistance, and dialogue.
A 2018 fellow of the Whitney Independent Study Program and holder of an MA in Art and the Book from the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George Washington University, San Martin has presented her work internationally in solo exhibitions at Un Lugar (Madrid, 2025), The Print Center (PA, 2023), Trinity College (CT), Fordham University (NYC), Goethe-Institut (Montreal, 2023), the Meermanno Museum (The Hague, 2019), the National Archive of Chile (2018), and BRIC Art (Brooklyn, 2017), among others. Her work has also been featured in major group exhibitions and biennials, including the Triennial of Poli/Gráfica de Puerto Rico (2024), the Immigrant Artist Biennial (New York, 2020), as well as public art and performances at Lincoln Center and Rockefeller Center in collaboration with the Climate Museum (2022). She was also commissioned by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (2023).
Her work is held in over 80 collections worldwide, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the Klingspor Museum, Harvard University, and the Museum of Memory and Human Rights. She has been awarded two NYFA Artist Fellowships, four FONDART grants from the Chilean government, a Parsons PD Grant, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant, and a Becas Chile Fellowship. Her artist residencies include the Monira Foundation, Interlude, Proyecto ACE, the Center for Book Arts, and Art OMI.
San Martin has been developing Moving Memorials since 2012, a long-term series of 13 artist books comprising 203 hand-printed titles. Using drypoint, lithography, silkscreen, and letterpress, the books serve as poetic, tactile archives often activated through performance. Her ongoing project Dignidad, launched during her Whitney fellowship and first presented at Artists Space (New York, 2018), investigates a former torture site in Chile through survivors’ testimonies, sculpture, sound, and performance. It includes the first-ever public release of a historical audio recording and has been exhibited across the Americas and Europe, generating academic and literary responses. During the pandemic, she created The Javelin Project, a multimedia ritual-performance that examines migration and resistance through the evolution of the spear and javelin. The work includes choreography, artist books, a three-channel video installation, and original music.
San Martin is also a committed educator and community organizer. Over the past five years, she has led participatory art workshops across New York City in collaboration with the MET, Art’s Education Department and New Latin Wave, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, The Weeksville Heritage Center, Interference Archive, and Booklyn Art (where she serves on the board).
She currently teaches Communication Design and Printmaking at Parsons School of Design and offers courses at the Center for Book Arts and Mixteca, using art as a tool for storytelling and empowerment within immigrant and refugee communities.
Dignidad I, 2019
photo lithography on paper (image and text printed both sides)
25.5in x 25.5in x 1in
Dignidad II, 2019
photo lithography on paper (image and text printed both sides)
25.5in x 25.5in x 1in
Memory and Landscape. Unveiling the Historic Truths of Chile. 1973-1990, 2013
Artist book with drypoint aquatint etchings, woodblocks, silkscreen, charcoal powder, hand stitch, ink, clamshell box and video
10in x 7in x 1in
Installation of Memory and Landscape. Unveiling the Historic Truths of Chile. 1973-1990