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ach one of Victoria Martinez’s vibrant,
mixed media creations thoughtfully
responds to a specific memory, space, or
experience. Her bold color palette celebrates
Mexican heritage and the urban environment in
Pilsen, where the artist was raised and currently
lives. Martinez explores these ideas through
fiber art, site-specific installation, painting,
and printmaking. Her work often plays with
notions of space and place through outdoor
installations that join urban and natural worlds.
Flowers Never Purchased
(2013), for instance,
evokes the awe-inspiring, sensory experience
of visiting a store filled with cut flowers. This
lively, floral patterned installation stretched
across the storefront of a former flower shop
in Pilsen, reminding the viewer of the treasures
it once held.
In creating work for
Celestial House
, Martinez
drew inspiration from her childhood home in
Pilsen, both by physically referencing the house
with fragments of wallpaper and curtains and
by visually responding to specific memories
and feelings nurtured within the space. She
honors her childhood home, admiring her
mother’s ability to create a beautiful space
adorned with simple objects, thrift store finds,
and bright paint and wallpaper. Martinez favors
mundane, ephemeral materials, thoughtfully
incorporating items such as paper streamers
and bright plastic flowers in her work.
Martinez also considers the greater Pilsen
community as her home and celebrates the
neighborhood as a space where she grew and
was mentored as an artist.
Celestial House
conveys the hopes and desires that were
nurtured within her home in Pilsen, but the
exhibition also evokes the artist’s longing to
seek new experiences and environments.
Bursting with pattern, Martinez’s work is
inspired by textiles with bright colors and
geometric designs. She is also intrigued by wear
patterns and visible aging in cloth. Martinez
considers cloth to be a universal material that
connects people across cultures. Textiles can
serve as rich documents of history, culture,
and making practices. During her 2018 Arts
Incubator residency at theUniversity of Chicago,
Martinez worked with textile collections at the
National Textile Museum and the National
Museum of African Art. Delving into these
collections, she researched African andMexican
textiles, studying similarities in their symbols,
colors, and patterns.
Outside of the studio, Martinez is also an
educator and has worked with Urban Gateways
and Chicago Public Schools, the National
Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA), and the
Hyde Park Arts Center. She loves to work with
students and is excited to share her passion
for creating with youth. Martinez encourages
students to connect with their heritage. In
recent embroidery and screen printing projects
at the NMMA, she helped students incorporate
patterns and symbols from Latin American
textiles as inspiration for their work.
Martinez’s work is also currently on view in
Fiber Nation
at the Saugatuck Center for the
Arts, where she is a 2018 Artist in Residence
and a featured artist in their youth outreach
program.
Image (left): Victoria Martinez,
Oakley
, 2018, mixed media.