Past Resident

Lizzy Martinez

A figurative, Latina artist based in St. Louis, Lizzy Martinez channels traditional techniques while considering the human form with a pointed, feminist perspective through symbolism, humor, and tension.  She received her MFA in painting from Boston University and is an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and Brand Boeshaar awardee. She has exhibited in galleries, museums, and universities including the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

“I marry various cultural outputs of the past to talk about concerns of the present.  Advocating for women’s and animal rights in a medium that has traditionally given males the advantage, my work reflects both the hardships and accomplishments women face.”

Q&A with Lizzy Martinez (from Crosstown Arts newsletter, Nov. 9, 2021)

Crosstown Arts residency alumnus Lizzy Martinez utilizes the figure to engage social advocacy, butting against the perceptions of time and art history while focusing on women’s experiences. She alters stories to take the audiences’ typical encounters to better suit a feminist or minority-inclusive agenda. Viewers must confront their expectations as she places breadcrumbs for them to interpret, usually guiding them towards unconventional protagonists.

Crosstown Arts registrar Jesse Butcher caught up with Martinez to discuss painting, time-lapse videos, and the soundtracks that accompany her work.

Jesse: While developing a figurative practice, you’ve moved into the realm of allegorical painting. When starting a new work, how much of that is constructed ahead of time? Or is some of that found through the process of the physical act of painting?

Lizzy: I do have a strong idea going into each work in terms of color, light placement, composition, and major elements or themes, but there is still some play in terms of the details and what the paint or substrate surfaces present that is somewhat impromptu. Examples include some of the recent works on paper I’ve been creating. I’ve always love anatomy and skeletons and have begun to follow that indulgence more into comparative anatomy toward other species. Little details might pop up depending on how long and how thoroughly I work the paper. More often, people think of watercolor as quick and immediate towards a swift conclusion.

Many of your works seem to nod to classical painting with reference to their anatomical and biological content. However, in the context of your work, they retain a certain prophetic significance. When did your relationship with these references begin?

LM:  I’ve always loved art history, since childhood. Even being a kid and being bored at church, the only thing one could do was to study every stained glass window or ghoulish but brightly pastel Resurrection painting.

Beyond their prescribed moral teachings, these usually had a very strong sense of body and celebration of anatomy. It wasn’t until I was older that I began to sort of re-write those structures and impulses toward my own work, which would place a greater emphasis on female-based centrality.

I also grew up with two double-doctorate parents who worked in academia and medicine. I literally had to waste countless hours as a kid in the lab looking at specimens in jars, lab animals in cages that I was forbidden from playing with, and skeletons on racks or anatomical system diagrams on walls. That may have started both a spark of curiosity and just of an acceptance that we’re all made of bones, blood, and guts, and that’s the building blocks of animals and people alike. Also, St. Louis has a wonderful zoo, and I remember going there, as well as seeing a lot of interesting species studies in old specimen illustrations, such as those by John James Audubon.

Sometimes we project a romantic or anthropocentric series of notions onto animals. I can remember wondering about the dodo since childhood and how sailors could just decimate a species so easily. When I went to grad school and actually visited the Museum of National History at Harvard in order to see that rare husk of a specimen, it was rather disappointing somehow. Whatever the taxidermy behind the glass presented, it just wasn’t enough to capture the loss of that extinct flightless bird that had sort of became the unwitting poster child for species extinction before almost anyone considered that an abomination. Sometime in the next year, I hope to do a large-scale work focusing on the less celebrated, distant bird cousin of the dodo legacy, North America’s now long-gone only parrot species, the now-extinct Carolina Parakeet. It tickles me for some reason to imagine this colorful parrot cruising the Mississippi River on the shores of what would later be St. Louis around the time the Lewis and Clark expedition was trying to navigate the region. Now sadly, the United States no longer has these brightly colored prairie parrots.

You create time-lapse videos of the process of executing these works, offering a look behind the curtain into the life of artist. Are these documents a kind of duality? Evidence of creation of a mythical space within the painting while exposing the “mythical space” of the artist’s studio?

The time-lapses do allow a little glimpse behind the curtain. They tend to show some of the immense amounts of work that goes into a larger piece. As an artist who teaches, I also know that these are exceptionally useful for outreach (to audiences of strangers on social media) but also as a means to efficiently inform people outside the discipline (say on a grant panel or other arts committee) about how I make the art. I wish my St. Louis studio was more mythical. Not everyone has the wonderful kind of space at home that they might find in the studios at Crosstown. (Sigh!)

You recently debuted a collection of works in St. Louis entitled “Seeing Red.” For this iteration, the visual works were accompanied by a sound collage you created. Is that an element you are expanding to future exhibitions? When did you realize that these visuals had a soundtrack?

It is something I would like revisit and maybe plan for some future media arts/animated works. I like that sound asks the visitor to spend some linear time with the work, to experience and interpret in a way that is maybe not as immediately dismissed as a visual painting might be. I do love trying out new media and just experimenting. Putting other sensory elements together seems more like an indulgence I would allow for a bigger show to create an atmosphere rather than going that way for a group exhibition or a more singularly conceived piece.

Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of grant support for sculpture, so I’m starting to plan a sculpture show around biology, dreams, and veiled atmospheres. I might get closer to the launch of that and decide it needs a sound piece too. This could go a little bit haunted house-meets-experimental psychiatric treatment. I suppose many people would perceive that as cheesy, but I also think over-the-top things can be fun. There are planned floating spectral paintings with little surprises on the backside of the semi-opaque frosted mylar. Those will ripple in the breeze as they hang suspended and people move around the space. These will form a sort of graveyard in front of a 15-foot spider of carved wood that will be crawling up the back wall with colored glass eyes.  If I temper the maximalist format with beauty, I think it works. I will probably have to decide if the spider needs an accompaniment once I’ve built it out.

Thanks for taking the time to speak with us about your work, Lizzy!