ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA

Enrique Martínez Celaya is an artist, author, and former scientist whose work encompasses painting, sculpture, drawing, immersive environments, essays, poetry, and fiction. His practice examines the experience of the individual amid social, ethical, and existential conditions, and the capacity of art to widen perception and lend structure to meaning. These concerns take form through materials ranging from oil paint and bronze to tar, blood, and sugar, as he investigates the nature of art, memory, exile, and the legacies of history.

His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in more than sixty public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, The Huntington, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has undertaken major projects and installations worldwide, including at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Berliner Philharmonie in Berlin, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, and has participated in two-person exhibitions with historical figures such as Albert Pinkham Ryder, Käthe Kollwitz, and Diego Velázquez.

Martínez Celaya is the author of nine books on art, philosophy, and poetry, including two volumes of Collected Writings and Interviews published by the University of Nebraska Press. He recently completed his first novel and has co-authored Tending the Fire: Creativity, Purpose, and the Unfolding Self with the Jungian psychoanalyst James Hollis, as well as Pebbles: The Commonalities and Divergences of Art and Science with Nobel laureate chemist Roald Hoffmann and the philosopher and physicist Aleksandr P. Svitin (forthcoming). His work has been the subject of fourteen monographic publications, including Martínez Celaya SEA SKY LAND: Towards a Map of Everything, and Enrique Martínez Celaya and Käthe Kollwitz: Von den Ersten und den Letzten Dingen, both published by Hatje Cantz. (All of his books are linked below.)

He is the first Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at the University of Southern California. His teaching integrates literature, philosophy, and art, reflecting a sustained commitment to education and inquiry across disciplines. In 2025, he received USC’s highest faculty honor, the Associates Award for Artistic Expression. He has also served as Roth Family Distinguished Visiting Scholar and Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, as the second Presidential Professor in the history of the University of Nebraska, and as a tenured professor at Pomona College. In 2021, he was awarded a Doctor honoris causa by Otis College of Art and Design. He was the first Visual Arts Fellow at The Huntington Library, where his sculpture became the institution’s first contemporary acquisition in its century-long history.

He has been invited to speak at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Academy in Berlin, Stanford University, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Aspen Institute, the Royal Drawing School in London, and the Aspen Center for Physics. In 2020, he delivered the commencement address at Otis College of Art and Design. In 1998, he founded Whale & Star, an initiative integrating artistic mentorship, cultural engagement, and publishing in critical theory, art, and poetry. The initiative also established The Lecture Project, a forum bringing together leading writers and scholars to examine the ethical dimensions of art. His collaborations extend across disciplines, including a twenty-year partnership with the Canadian rock band Cowboy Junkies.

Martínez Celaya began his training as a painter’s apprentice at the age of twelve. At sixteen, he built a laser that received national recognition, and during his youth he published poems, essays, and short stories. He studied applied physics, literature, and art at Cornell University, where he worked at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source. He went on to earn an M.S. and completed Ph.D. coursework in quantum electronics at the University of California, Berkeley, supported by a Regents Fellowship and Brookhaven National Laboratory. Before devoting himself fully to art, he received patents and authored scientific papers in laser physics and superconductivity. He later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture on an honorary scholarship and earned his M.F.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1994, where he received the department’s highest distinction and served as a Junior Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. After graduation, he joined Pomona College as a professor and, two years later, received the Young Talent Award from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

(Text courtesy of Studio Enrique Martínez Celaya.)

JAMES HOLLIS

James Hollis, Ph.D. is a Jungian psychoanalyst, teacher, and author in Washington, D.C.

He holds a Ph.D. in literature and philosophy from Drew University and taught humanities and the philosophic traditions of cultures for over 25 years before training as a Jungian psychoanalyst at the C.G. Jung Institute Zürich where he graduated with a Diploma in Analytical Psychology in 1982.

Dr. Hollis is the co-founder and first director of training of the Philadelphia Jung Institute, worked as a senior training analyst for the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, and from 1998-2008 served as executive director of the C.G. Jung Educational Center in Houston, Texas.

In 2014, he relocated to Washington, D.C. where he spent the next five years as executive director of the Jung Society of Washington, and now serves on its board of directors. He is also vice president emeritus of the Philemon Foundation and a former professor of Jungian Studies at Saybrook University.

Dr. Hollis continues to lecture online and to write. He is the author of 21 books, available in translations around the world. His titles are, in order: Harold Pinter, The Middle Passage, Under Saturn’s Shadow, Tracking the Gods, Swamplands of the Soul, The Eden Project, The Archetypal Imagination, Creating a Life, On This Journey We Call Our Life, Mythologems, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, Why Good People Do Bad Things, What Matters Most, Hauntings, Living an Examined Life, Living Between Worlds, Prisms, The Broken Mirror, A Life of Meaning, Living with Borrowed Dust, and his latest, Tending the Fire: Creativity, Purpose, and the Unfolding Self, co-authored with Enrique Martínez Celaya. (All of his books are linked below.)

He has joined us on eight previous episodes of Speaking of Jung, including our live, celebratory 100th episode. Please visit the James Hollis section of our website for a comprehensive look at his work including links to all of our previous episodes, his books, audiobooks, films, print interviews, and a series of online video courses – through the Jung Society of Washington – that you can start any time, complete at your own pace, and enjoy lifetime access to the material.

This video interview was recorded on Monday, February 2, 2026. It’s 01:06:50 long and 64.2 MB. You can listen to it right here in your browser (click the play button in the bar below) or watch the video edition on YouTube.

📷 Photo credits: Enrique Martínez Celaya by Christopher Michel, 2020; James Hollis by Mike Blabac, 2024.

SHOW NOTES

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C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles

The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife by James Hollis

Demian by Hermann Hesse

Harold Pinter: The Poetics of Silence by James Hollis (his first book)

Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth in Modern Life by James Hollis

Tracking the Gods: The Movement of Archetypal Powers in Our Time Online video course with James Hollis

The Apple Tree A video by Studio Enrique Martínez Celaya, 2017-2023.