Leslie Martinez

MoMA PS1 presents Leslie Martinez’s (b. 1985, McAllen, Texas) first New York museum exhibition. Martinez, who lived in New York City for fifteen years before returning to Texas in 2019, exhibits their largest body of work to date, which features recent paintings and three newly commissioned large-scale artworks. Using a cosmic palette based on the CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black) color model, the artist sprays and stains canvases with diluted paint, and then folds, pools, and collages materials onto the surface—including rags and dried acrylics. Combining a no-waste approach with methodologies of rasquachismo, a term coined by scholar Tomás Ybarra-Fausto to describe a Chicano “attitude rooted in resourcefulness yet mindful of stance and style,” Martinez wields an embodied way of painting that draws on formal legacies of abstraction, as well as generational practices of survival and sustenance learned from their family. The Fault of Formation includes works that make reference to the earth’s fault lines and shifting tectonic plates, dueling forces that give rise to mountains. Their paintings mirror the fractures wrought by a nation built on binary politics, as well as the hope that can arise from creation born in spite of, and at times from, chaos and confusion. Martinez’s liberatory works offer “a place to spiral and search” through an abstract language that underscores potentiality and becoming.

Leslie Martinez received an MFA from Yale University in 2018 and a BFA from The Cooper Union in 2008. They have had solo exhibitions at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2023); Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2023); and And Now, Dallas (2021, 2020). Martinez has participated in residencies at Denniston Hill, Woodbridge (2023); Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Dallas (2020) and Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson (2019). They are the recipient of the Latinx Artist Fellowship (2022). Martinez’s work is in the collections of Dallas Museum of Art; Pérez Art Museum Miami; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and Speed Art Museum, Louisville.