Oaxacan Farmworker Turned Artist Reveals Struggles in the Fields Through Portraits on Produce Boxes
The produce section of any supermarket may be a gleaming call to live healthier lives, but how many of us connect each crunchy apple, sweet strawberry or ripe avocado in our shopping carts to dusty farms and hardworking laborers? Long Beach-based Oaxacan artist Narsiso Martinez is intimately aware of this long, complicated journey. He has lived through it and now he's helping connect the dots for many of us writing our weekly grocery lists.
Martinez draws richly detailed portraits of migrant farmworkers amid lush, agricultural landscapes on discarded cardboard produce boxes. His works, informed by his life experience growing up in a small farming Oaxaca town and by 1930s-era Social Realism, are now hotly pursued by collectors. His second solo show, "Tender Leaves," last December at Charlie James Gallery was an unquestioned success. "[It] basically sold out. We have a substantial waiting list for the work now," revealed gallery owner Charlie James. Martinez is part of a major exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in the sixth triennial "The Outwin 2022: American Portraiture Today," on view until February 26, 2023. His work is also on view at the Orange County Museum of Art's "California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold" on view concurrently.
"When people see my work, I hope they see these individuals who work in the fields — that they're really at the frontlines of food production, and that they are humans, they have families. We need them to have the same opportunities as everybody else" says Martinez of the farmworkers he advocates for, which include his brothers, his friends and his community.
Farmworkers work under some of the worst conditions imaginable. According to the Berkeley Political Review, they face multiple threats on farms: pesticide exposure, long hours in the heat, low wages and no benefits. Estimates place their wages at $11.85 hourly, far below the $14.99 an hour living wage in California. Up to 20,000 farmworkers suffer from pesticide poisoning every year. Many more experience long-term health issues such as cancer, asthma and Parkinson's disease.
Farmworker Finds His Artist's Way
Martinez's sophisticated portraiture successfully brings into focus the lives that make our way of life possible, and he is uniquely positioned to tell their stories. The artist was once a farmworker himself. It was through his work in the fields that he funded his education in the United States.
Born in Santa Cruz Papalutla, Oaxaca — a town with just over two thousand people —the soft-spoken artist grew up seeing people tending their small plots of land and taking care of sheep. "I've been always attracted to drawing since I was a kid," said Martinez, "I always went to my neighbors who were willing to sit still a little bit for me and do a little sketch of themselves. I didn't know [at the time], but when I went to school, I learned that life drawing is essential."
It was only when Martinez made the journey north of the border that he realized art could truly be a career. Martinez crossed the border at 20 years old as many in his village did. "It's like a culture over there," said Martinez. He recalls going to town gatherings, seeing the teenagers who had come back from the United States dressed in nice clothes and shoes and wanting to emulate them. Life across the border held the promise of the American dream. "A lot of people I remember didn't have even TVs or bikes and beds. I grew up sleeping on the floor because we didn't have beds and a lot of people were like that," recalls Martinez of his youth now two decades past, "Just the idea of getting new shoes and nice clothes, maybe having a better home. That was the encouragement to go to the United States."
Martinez had not felt his relative poverty growing up. It was only as he grew older and attended school in a larger town that he saw other people's stares at his sandals, his old clothes. He would eat homemade tacos for lunch while his classmates would purchase food from the cafeteria. "I started questioning why things were the way they were and I started being resentful towards society," said Martinez.
The artist would find his answers while learning the English language and working toward his high school diploma at Evans Community Adult School in downtown Los Angeles. Unlike his older brothers who had crossed the border ahead of him, Martinez was insistent to learning English rather than just finding work. "Those [English] words were so important for me because they are the ones who were always pushing me in my head. I need to go to school and to go to school to learn the language," says Martinez.
At Evans, "I learned how societies work, how the mind works and all these little things. I started to understand my parents, my community, the Catholic Church and the whole system," said Martinez. "When I learned about the slavery in the United States, I literally cried because I had never learned any of that when I was in Mexico."
After finishing his GED at 29 years old in 2006, Martinez continued his education at Los Angeles Community College, where an Art 101 class opened his eyes to the works of Van Gogh and Millet. Their scenes resonated with him and his bucolic childhood memories. It was then Martinez pursued a path towards art. "[My school advisors] literally drew a map to art school. These are the classes I need to take, get an [Associate in Arts] and to transfer to a regular college," said Martinez, "That's what I did. I followed it blindly."
A Blind Dedication
Martinez's dedication to art became his compass. To make ends meet while studying at Cal State Long Beach, he would work summers in Washington State, picking produce alongside his family. Martinez would work the whole season and return to campus with a pocketful of paychecks. He lived what he called a "double life," working in the farms, and then returning to the academia after the season was over. The artist would actively encourage those he worked with to try and go to school as well, but his remarks were brushed off, pragmatic considerations of putting food on the table always prevailing over a seemingly insurmountable challenge of getting an education. "I would tell them how great it is to have the chance to do something else, even to have just the knowledge or the courage to speak for ourselves, to even demand better wages or better working conditions," said Martinez.
It was a hand to mouth existence, but it was Martinez's singular focus on his work that eventually led to a breakthrough. At first, Martinez's attempts seemed too simplistic. His portraits of the indolent privileged side by side with those of the working-class farmers, "just wasn't working," said Martinez. An exhibition at Cypress College showed Martinez that cardboard can be a canvas, but it wasn't until he purchased pizza from Costco, that a pile of produce cardboard boxes caught his eye. Martinez drew a portrait of a farm worker on a produce box for bananas, which his critique class really responded to. "I didn't have to draw the ranch owners because they were represented on the labels," said Martinez, "The whole agribusiness was interpreted through the labels, and the working class and farmworkers were interpreted by the mark makings with charcoal, charcoal pencils, ink and gouache."
Encouraged by his class's response, Martinez continued to show his works around town, applying for grants to make ends meet. He won the Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship as he finished his Master of Fine Arts degree from California State University Long Beach in 2018. "That gave me cash to work pretty much for a year," said Martinez, "I didn't have to worry about a full-time job. I just focused on working and working." He then won another grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation once his Dedalus grant finished, enabling him to keep making work and showing around town. It was at one of these shows where gallerist Charlie James spotted him. "I thought of John Steinbeck and Social Realism when I saw Narsiso’s work for the first time," said James, "It strikes me that the current moment is absolutely perfect for this work, as we think about 'essential workers' and disrupted supply chains and the like."
After a studio visit, James signed him onto his roster and opened the doors to a true career in artmaking. Martinez now laughs at the memories of him hiring a deluxe Uber just to transport his cardboard boxes, paying $40 in fare only to earn the same amount from a sale of one artwork. "I didn't know how to price my work," admits Martinez.
Space to Create
Working with James has allowed Martinez the space to be able to create. Nowadays, Martinez's life revolves around his artmaking. He lives right beside his studio and sometimes works from 10 a.m. until past midnight when deadlines are looming. There is no TV in his studio. "I usually sit here and I spend a lot of time staring at the work," says Martinez.
Martinez now works on multiple pieces at a time, creating sculptures and large installations all using his drawings and discarded boxes. Flattened boxes of Dole premium bananas showcase a painstakingly drawn image of a man wearing protective goggles, a stifling bandana and protective wear. In "Fruit Catcher," a portrait of a masked man wearing a baseball hat and hoodie merits a gold-leafed background, its color an indicator of how much the artist values his subject. In "Pacific Gold," the centerpiece of his previous show at Charlie James Gallery, produce boxes were stacked one on top of the other, forming a tower almost 7 feet tall. A farmworker with a smiling face showers the viewer with a torrent of grapes, peppers, strawberries and oranges, while a peacock stands resplendent beside the cornucopia. Its joyful, optimistic stance belies the struggle of working the land itself.
At this point, Martinez is intensely focused on just making work. He realizes the fortunate circumstance and hard work that got him there, but one he hopes won't be singular in his community. While he continues to make artwork, Martinez is also looking to start an art residency program in his village, inspired by his residency experiences at the Fountainhead Residency in Miami, the Long Beach Museum of Art and at the Long Beach City College. He already has a few plots of land earmarked and construction is starting on an actual structure. The idea is to expose his village to the work of artists abroad and vice versa — and perhaps to inspire others to follow in his footsteps — to dream beyond just crossing the border.
