New Acquisition: Mario Martinez

BY ERIN JOYCE | FINE ARTS CURATOR

In the spring of 2021, the Heard Museum was fortunate to add another contemporary work to the permanent collection. Lone Blueish NYC Revelry is a 2019 acrylic on canvas by the Pascua Yaqui artist Mario Martinez. Martinez was born in the Penjamo village, a Yaqui settlement in South Scottsdale, Ariz., in 1953. He attended Arizona State University and the San Francisco Art Institute, where he earned his bachelor of fine arts and master of fine arts degrees, respectively.

Martinez’s work is part of a continuum of his Yaqui culture and heritage but is not derivative of it. Indigenous art and visual culture has a long history of abstraction, which Martinez embraces. He eschews figural work that is the byproduct of European colonization and fetishization of Indigenous peoples and is saturated with fixed readings of Indigeneity and harmful tropes such as the “noble savage.” Instead, he thrusts his work into non-formal abstraction referencing Yaqui histories, all the while creating a conversation between Indigenous visual practices and artists like Willem de Kooning and Lee Krasner.

In Lone Blueish NYC Revelry, we see a work filled with a quiet tension. There is a soft focus to the work, an almost blurred, dream-like image, which is jolted with hints of bright blue and visible brushwork—reminding you that, indeed, this is a painting. The work is intimate in scale at 24 by 20 inches, yet it has an enveloping presence. The ways in which Martinez pushes the paint on and into the canvas suggest buildings and abstracted forms, placing you on the streets of New York, where Martinez lives and works. The shapes morph into skyscrapers soaring above the viewer while at the same time rejecting any formalism, with amorphous shapes floating in a flattened painted plane.

As with any new acquisition to the permanent collection, we look forward to exhibiting this work, which was purchased in part through the generosity of Frank and Betsy Goodyear. Lone Blueish NYC Revelry is truly a stellar addition to the holdings of the Heard Museum.

Mario Martinez (Pascua Yaqui, b. 1953). Lone Blueish NYC Revelry, 2019. Acrylic on Canvas, 24 x 20. Acquisition made possible in part by Frank and Betsy Goodyear.