MOLAA to Showcase Artist Narsiso Martinez's Homage to Ag Workers

Narsiso Martinez's exhibit Rethinking Essential, opens on August 14 at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA). This exhibition is organized in collaboration with The Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego (https://icasandiego.org/) which will host the artist and his exhibition on February 2023.

Narsiso Martinez was born in Santa Cruz Papalutla, Oaxaca, Mexico, and came to the United States when he was 20 years old. He currently lives in Long Beach, California. He attended Evans Community Adult School, completed high school in 2006 at the age of 29, and then earned an Associate of Arts in 2009 from Los Angeles City College. In the fall of 2012, he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from California State University Long Beach and received a Master of Fine Arts at the same institution in 2018. To fund his undergraduate studies and MFA in drawing and painting he returned to the fields in Washington State, where he picked fruits and vegetables, specifically apples, asparagus, and cherries. He would literally work the whole season and return to campus with a pocketful of paychecks. He lived what he called a "double life," working on the farms, and then returning to academia after the season was over.

"We are very pleased to showcase the artwork of Narsiso Martinez," said Lourdes I. Ramos-Rivas Ph.D., President, and CEO of MOLAA. "Particularly because his work pays homage to a powerful working class that is for the most part nonexistent to America yet so important to put food on every table in America. Martinez's work focuses on and reminds all of us of the people performing the labor necessary to fill grocery produce sections and restaurant kitchens around the country. Hopefully, his work will remind all of us of the gratitude we owe each human being who toils every day to provide food for all of us."

Martinez takes inspiration from varied artists including Jean-Francois Millet, Thomas Hart Benton, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. He goes to great lengths to portray, with great economy and depth of feeling, the largely invisible group of people responsible for putting food on America's tables: immigrant farmworkers.

Narsiso Martinez's drawings and mixed media installations include individual portraits and multi-figure compositions of farm laborers set against the agricultural landscapes and brand designs of grocery store produce boxes. Drawn from his own experience as a farmworker, Martinez's work focuses on the people performing the labors that are the foundation of our food systems—filling produce sections and restaurant kitchens around the country. Martinez's portraits of farmworkers build on the materiality of working in the fields with earth-like charcoal drawn across reclaimed boxes.

In the tradition of Social Realism, his images reframe power in the hands of the workers. The subjects of his portraits are the main characters, up front in a single portrait or in the foreground of a larger landscape focusing on the humanity of farmworkers and daily life working in the fields.

Narsiso Martinez creates drawings and mixed-media installations that focus on the lives, dreams, and labor of the thousands of migrant agricultural workers on whom society depends for their produce. The artist creates and assembles his work on and with discarded cardboard produce boxes that he himself collects from grocery stores. In this show, he created new artworks such as a large mural about the past, present, and future, portraits of farmworkers, a special video, and an installation.

This exhibition is supported in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency. Learn more at www.arts.ca.gov.