Narsiso Martinez goes hunting to the grocery stores, in search for cardboard boxes, looking for surfaces for his creations. He gathers them as if they were empty canvases and paints over them the scenes of the farmworkers in the United States fields. He portrays them with charcoal, acrylic, and gold leaf. He paints what he knows well, his Mexican coworkers above all, but also others coming from Central American countries. During several summers, Narsiso Martínez was a farmworker himself in the fields of Washington state, in order to save money to pay for his university tuition.
Nowadays, because of his work, he has been an artist-in-residence at the Long Beach Museum of Art in California since 2018. His 3-D project “Friends in Freshness” was one of the main exhibitions of the inaugural reopening of the new headquarters, Long Beach Museum of Art Downtown, where his work can be seen through November 3rd. He has exhibited his work at the Centro Cultural Cinematográfico de México of the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles, at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the Orange County Fair and currently at the Charlie James Gallery.
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Martínez arrived in the US from his native Oaxaca, at the age of 21. That was 20 years ago. He was following the steps his immigrant brothers had already traced. They had grown up in the countryside, working the land, eating from their harvest.
When Martinez failed high school, he decided to leave. When he arrived in the United States, he studied the local language in the English as a Second Language program, EFE reports. And when he finished, he was eager to deepen his studies, finish high school. He got to know the work of universal artists in the History of Art course.
As a child, back in Oaxaca, he sketched portraits of his neighbors, drew the faces of celebrities he found in magazines, Long Beach Posts’ Asia Morris writes. Now in California, he had to enter university and hesitated whether to follow a career to become a math or biology teacher because of his good grades in these subjects, as reported by EFE. But he followed his vocation and enrolled in Arts at The California State University, known as Cal State, in Long Beach.
That was 2009, and he was 32.
At first, he helped himself with jobs such as fruit delivery or gardening. The money wasn’t enough for him to keep paying the tuition, so the following summer he went to Washington State to work in the fields with his brothers. And so he did for several more summers. He picked asparagus from 1 a.m. to 3 p.m., a few cents a pound. Extensive and exhausting days in which he collected and cut the asparagus; the company only paid him and his companions for the pieces he had cut to the size they wanted. If it was too short, Long Beach Post reported, it was discarded.“And what I discovered later is they actually use those trashed parts. They’d send it to the warehouse and they’d bottle them, and they would still make money off of it, but we wouldn’t get paid for them,” Martinez told Asia Morris.
Under these conditions, with many limitations, he managed to save money and pay for the tuition, and also to reduce the university debt. He continued to go to the fields every summer, got to know better the rest of coworkers and also some farm owners, writes Luis Uribe in EFE’s office.
Morris adds that Martínez went to see where the rest of workers lived. They were mostly old men, women, and children sleeping in trailers in parking lots. Many were his countrymen, but they also came from El Salvador and Guatemala.
He found a line of work to develop at the university. He tried painting on cardboard boxes. It was trial and error.
“I would always talk about this idea of me representing the farm workers or the working class against the rich people[…]then when I did the drawing on the cardboard it evolved to become more about the farmworkers versus the agribusiness. That’s when everything kind of clicked,” he told the Long Beach Post.
Narsiso Martinez continued a master’s degree in Arts with financial aid from the state of California, while perfecting the technique of painting on the colorful cardboard boxes from the grocery stores. At first, EFE reports, he removed the labels, but then left them as part of his art and claim: the brands, the logos, the contents of the boxes. Fuji apples, bananas, grapes. In the background of the art piece, there were the fruits and the logos, and in the center, the protagonists, or a group of them, with the same products in their hands. Those are the ones who collected the food that the ones who bought –the ones who see the work– ate or are eating.
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“There was a compelling story that went along with his pieces, and I really realized there’s a lot going on in there, and there were some cultural differences that I think, in the beginning, he was uncomfortable with, but it’s really wonderful the way he’s learned to speak about his life. Every image that he does, he knows the person, and he’s painted them for a reason,” Ronald Nelson, executive director of the LMBA, told Christi Carras of The Angeles Times.
Upon completing his master’s degree, Narsiso Martinez considered returning to the field to work again, but his brother prevented him from doing so. Museum artist residencies and a scholarship also kept him in Long Beach, painting. He does not yet live out of his paintings, but he continues with his purpose.
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When exhibiting “Farm Fresh” at LMBA last year, Martinez found the opportunity to break out of strictly Hispanic circuits and expand his audience.
“We have the opportunity to show the experiences of the farmworker, or to show that farmworkers are as important to the economy as any other group of workers in the nation, to other kinds of audiences, not just the Latino community,” he said to Long Beach Post.
About “Friends in Freshness” he told the LA Times: “There’s already progress because we are acknowledging them, and we’re seeing them. Maybe when they go to the grocery store and think about it a little bit more … I think changes happen in little steps, and I hope that this is part of it.”