Visual artist affiliated with community and pedagogic practices. He co-founded Lugar Común—still active since its 2011 Oaxaca inauguration—a neighborhood group for investigating possible adaptations between community self-organization and citizen participation in urban life. The group was part of the Arts Collaboratory international network from 2016 to 2018. In 2023 Ruiz Martínez participated in the Learning Contexts program at Hong Kong’s Asia Art Archive AAA after doing a 2022 documenta 15 Notes on Education residency in Kassel, Germany. He received two Jóvenes Creadores grants from the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, in 2014 and 2018, for projects that relate the rural and the urban in line with social, climatic and community dimensions. He directed the Museo Tamayo’s education and public programs department from 2019 to 2023.

Tiempo de ganar, 2024
Wall painting and mixed media polyptych

Artistic-pedagogical processes lead to reflections on collective work in contemporary art, which has been historically focused on the value of authorship and individual production. The drawings and diagrams in this exhibition room hail from Tiempo de ganar: programa de entrenamiento de principios asociativos e intuiciones colectivas (Time to Win: A Training Program for Associative Principles and Collective Intuitions), an artistic-pedagogical program based on play, basketball logic, and the notion of training. This collection shares reflections and other content arising from conversations with people when designing the training program (which will take place during the Biennial) and through collaboration with Alejandra Arellano, former professional player, coach, and founder of León’s “Panteras” team. 

The artist’s interest in basketball is linked to personal experience, having practiced the sport in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, where basketball is deeply linked to regional community traditions. Applying artistic reflections to sports allows us to think about body language ​​and mutual trust, tools that encourage the dissolution of individualism, and the dynamics of basketball—exploring new approaches to collective conceits in artistic processes.