After migrating to the United States at the age of 20, he paid for his college education by working long grueling hours in the fields picking fruits and vegetables alongside other farmworkers.
Eventually, artist Narsiso Martinez earned a BFA in 2012 and an MFA in 2018 from California State University in Long Beach. But he never forgot those arduous years in the fields collecting the food that we pick from the produce aisle at supermarkets.
Now a successful painter whose work has been exhibited in places like LACMA, the Hammer Museum, MOLAA, Long Beach Museum of Art and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Martinez is honoring those roots and his fellow farmworkers with a new exhibition at the Catalina Museum for Art & History titled “Witnesses of Labor — Portraits of Essential Workers.”
“I hope people can see the humanity in farmworkers, I hope people can acknowledge farmworkers, I hope people realize there are individual human beings working out there so we can have food,” Martinez said.
The exhibition runs through Oct. 11 and includes more than a dozen large-scale installations, drawings and mixed-media works depicting farmworkers. Using ink and charcoal as a main medium, Martinez created the pieces on discarded produce boxes that carry harvested fruits and vegetables from fields to markets.
“Art shouldn’t be a pretty thing to hang on the wall for decoration. Art can be powerful and bring awareness to people. So I decided to paint portraits of farmworkers so I could tell their stories,” he said. “This is about people who pick the food we consume, people who are on the frontline of food production and what we eat,” he added.
The images are made up of people Martinez worked with in the field and include depictions of a pair of to female farmworkers wearing masks. The portrait is attached to a Whole Foods grocery bag. Another piece is made up of a tower of produce boxes adorned with a depiction of a man picking asparagus while another shows a farmworker family on a box used to carry strawberries.
It was important for Martinez to use the boxes as the canvas for his painting since it adds more authenticity and strengthens the story behind the faces, he said. It was also important for him to use charcoal instead of oil to create the artwork.
“I feel like my hands get dirty and dusty when I use charcoal and it’s very interesting that it parallels the feeling in the fields. There’s a lot of dust and pesticides in the orchard and it stings and we used bandanas to protect ourselves, and in the studio my nose fills with charcoal particles and that makes the work more meaningful for me,” Martinez said.
Catalina Museum for Art & History
When: Through Oct. 11
Where: 217 Metropole Ave., Avalon
Cost: $12 for general admission, $10 for seniors and military and $7.50 for Catalina residents.
Information: catalinamuseum.org