Description
The accompanying catalog to the exhibition Patrick Martinez: Look What You Created at Tucson Museum of Art November 4, 2021 – April 24, 2022.
The events that transpired in 2020 changed our world forever. America grappled the pandemic, presidential election, tragic events, and systemic injustices faced by people of color to unveil a deeply divided nation. Through social media, protests, marches, and calls for accountability and equity, a new urgency arose, and artists across the United States responded with a profound reaction and message.
In his first solo museum exhibition in the American Southwest, Los Angeles-based artist Patrick Martinez (b. 1980, Pasadena, CA) explores personal, civic, and cultural loss in communities of color, discrimination, displacement, and demands accountability and transparency. Look What You Created, both the title and work in the exhibition, is an ambiguous phrase addressing both past challenges of fixed power systems and the present examples of democracy in action.
Martinez’s art takes on various forms in a variety of media, including mixed-media painting, neon signs, and cake paintings. Expanding his practice over the last year, Martinez explores socially engaged and accessible forms of work such as mass-produced lawn signs, a charitable art initiative folder project, and clothing. Captivating and provocative, Look What You Created exemplifies Martinez’s ability to invoke conversations about equity, empathy, humanity, and connection.
About the artist:
Patrick Martinez, (b. 1980 Pasadena, CA) earned his BFA with honors from Art Center College of Design in 2005. His work has been exhibited domestically and internationally in Los Angeles, Mexico City, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Miami, New York, Seoul, and the Netherlands, at venues including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, El Museo del Barrio, the Tucson Museum of Art, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, the Vincent Price Art Museum, the Museum of Latin American Art, LA Louver, Galerie Lelong & Co., Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, the Chinese American Museum and the Euphrat Museum of Art, among others. Patrick’s work resides in the permanent collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Tucson Museum of Art, the Crocker Art Museum, the Cornell Fine Art Museum, the Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Museum of Latin American Art, among others. Patrick lives and works in Los Angeles and is represented by Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles.
- Published by Tucson Museum of Art and Historic Block
- 2021
- ISBN 978-0-911611-46-5
- Hardcover
- 90 pages
- English
- Price includes domestic media rate shipping
