Collect Horned Toad Painting at Red Dot Art Spree!

oin me at the Red Dot Art Spree on Sep 5th! My work will be featured alongside over 150 other pieces with a wide range of perspectives and media. Women & Their Work’s highly anticipated celebration of art and community is the perfect occasion for art enthusiasts, advocates, collectors, and influencers to come together to admire and acquire new art.
Tickets are available now and support the gallery’s year-round exhibitions and expansive, no-cost education programs that introduce the joy and wonder of contemporary art to Austin school children.
Get your tickets now at womenandtheirwork.org/upcoming/reddot24/

Red Dot Art Spree in September!

Red Dot Art Spree is Friday, September 6 at Women and Their Work Gallery! This is a huge group exhibition of artwork under $1,000 that benefits their children’s education program! Put a red dot on my horned lizard painting for $500! View the catalogue below!

Borderless, My Solo Show at Art For The People Gallery

Borderless is my solo exhibition at Art For The People Gallery. It runs through August 27th. Meet me every Wednesday for gallery hours from 10-4! Art For The People Gallery is located at 1711 So. 1st, Austin, TX.

The following is my artist’s statement for the exhibition.

In my paintings I render a place called Borderlandia, a reimagined landscape full of life and movement, not divided by borders. Through painting, photography, drawing, video, and performance I invite people to contemplate the beauty that exists in a land where people negotiate their place, where people thrive and struggle, and where people resist the idea of unjust borders.

My paintings are inspired by the vast landscape of Uvalde, Texas and Piedras Negras, Mexico.  To render these borderlands I begin with a memory of this land. In this process I describe my memory of the borderland I grew up in. Uvalde County is a brush country blanketed with green and yellow prickly pear cactus and green and grey mesquite trees. I paint this thorny landscape with repetitive, rectangular marks of bright color in a grid pattern. My painting during this process is slow, mindful and healing. 

 

Painting landscapes is a way for me to understand the place where I am from. I grew up fishing and hunting with my father who taught me how to look at the land. My mother filled our home with textiles that created a soothing environment which helped me thrive in a sometimes, hostile town.

 

Today, the U.S.-Mexico border is constantly being presented as a place of danger and violence. But to me the borderlands are home. It’s a place of humanity, solidarity, and compassion. Paintings of Borderlandia are my valentine to the borderlands. They are my own addition, threads of color, to the fabrics woven by my mother, father, and those that came before them. Weaving history, emotion, and lived experiences; it is a way of preserving the chispas of joys birthed from these lands.

Borderlandia is an imagined and fascinating world.  Here, animals are special because they traverse the landscape sin fronteras.  Animals including dogs, monarch butterflies, and hummingbirds are companions to border-crossers in Borderlandia and they remind us that migration is beautiful.  Portraits of animals insert humor, comfort, and joy into difficult but urgent realities about the borderlands.

 

 

Many of the animals in these paintings were inspired by photographs that my Father, Joe Martinez, took while he was traveling through south Texas for work or when he was outside at home. My Dad was born in Uvalde.  He started his career as a substation electrician in 1982, and retired after 36 years in 2018. For many years he drove sometimes 500 miles in a day to check on substations in the rural landscape on ranches and different properties in and near Uvalde County. During these visits, he encountered owls, goats, cattle, and other animals.  My Dad began taking pictures of animals in 2012.   He said every photo was a spur of the moment thing.  He had to be quick and aware of his surroundings. He most often photographed these animals on his phone, and then texted them to me with a witty caption about his encounter.

 

This series was started in October 2021, but the last paintings were finished after May 24, 2022, when a horrific massacre took the lives of 19 children, 2 teachers, and injured 13 more and changed my hometown forever. Completing this series helped me find moments of relief in the midst of immeasurable grief.

FLOURISH open until January 2022

I am so happy to have paintings in the group show, FLOURISH at the fabulous Art For The People Gallery on South 1st street in Austin, TX! My paintings are available in person or you can shop Art For The People’s online store! Click HERE to learn more about these paintings! I will also be working gallery hours on Wednesdays and one weekend day each week! So come by the gallery and I’ll give you a tour of the artwork representing 40 local artists in FLOURISH!

Red Dot Art Spree

I sold two paintings at Women & Their Work Gallery’s Red Dot Art Spree! Proceeds enable W&TW to introduce 1,000 underserved students in the Austin area to the joy and wonder of contemporary art. See the exhibition in person at the gallery’s new location at 1311 E Cesar Chavez in Austin, TX. Here is a photo of me with “White Fence in Borderlandia” on September 30th, 2021.

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Readings in Borderlandia

MAR 27th | 2PM CST | Instagram LIVE @linkpinart

 Link & Pin Art presented poet Kimberly Alidio and visual and artist Andrea Muñoz Martinez in Readings From Borderlandia on Saturday, March 27th at 2PM CST on IGLIVE @linkpinart  Alidio read from her book, : once teeth bones coral : and Martinez read from Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera surrounded by her paintings of Borderlandia.

Click HERE to watch on Instagram TV!

Check out this post about Luna by Kimberly Alidio!!☝🏽☝🏽☝🏽🐶🐶

 Kimberly Alidio is the author of why letter ellipses (selva oscura press), : once teeth bones coral : (Belladonna* Collaborative), which is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and after projects the resound (Black Radish Books). Her forthcoming project, Ambient Mom, is an interdisciplinary work of translingual poetry, concrete poetry, essay, digital archive, and sound poetry recordings. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Michigan, and, in May 2021, will receive a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. At present, she lives between Tucson, AZ and Catskill, NY. She can be found at kimberlyalidio.com.  Kimberly Alidio's books can be purchased directly from her publishers: selva oscura press, Belladonna Collaborative and Black Radish Books.

 Andrea Muñoz Martínez is an artist currently living and working in Austin, Texas. She has an MFA from UCDavis and a BFA from The University of Texas at Austin.  Martínez paints a colorful, vibrant imaginary space she calls Borderlandia.  Her works include series on dogs, targets, roaches, chispas and caras malas. Martínez grew up in the borderlands of South Texas and her paintings and performance art take the border and boundaries as their subject. Her painting exhibition, “Dogs Heal in Borderlandia” can be viewed online and at Link & Pin Artspace in Austin, TX. Her paintings are available for purchase at xoxoammo.com and @linkpinart

XOXOAMMO: Paintings in Borderlandia by Andrea Muñoz Martínez

For the Austin Studio tour in November 2020 I installed ten paintings in the windows of Nova Hair Collective.  They were viewable from the sidewalk at the intersection of East Sixth and Robert Martinez Jr. Street.  These vivid paintings create a contemplative space for people to study the borderlands and to reflect on the urgent needs of people living there.

We Talk To Colors Jan - Mar 2021 at Cloud Tree Studios and Gallery

We Talk To Colors Jan - Mar 2021 at Cloud Tree Studios and Gallery

“I just wanted to fill the space with color and paintings. Salon style hanging with gestural realism, and some abstracts, just this colorful mix of oil and acrylic artworks. At first I called this “I Talk to Colors” because I was in Covid times and was grateful for my studio practice.

I for Isolation
I for I,Me,My
I for an Eye
-Heyd Fontenot text poem about art during quarantine

It’s a group show and so we gather in groups of four as “We Talk to Colors”. We don’t hug, but we can observe each other’s creations. Now is the time to stare and sit on and appreciate our talented city. It’s colorful, it’s loose, it’s realism, it’s abstraction.”

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Austin Studio Tour

Join me November 14 - 22 for (a new) Austin Studio Tour featuring Virtual Exhibitions, Online Programs, and city-wide Art Outdoors that can be safely viewed by self-guided walking or drive-by tours. Find out more about my art by checking out the newly expanded tour website at AustinStudioTour.org starting November 14. This year, I am presenting XOXO AMMO: a painting exhibition at Nova Hair Collective and I am teaching a class called: “How to Make Art Everyday.”