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Crossroads Gallery @ Downtown South Bend The Institute for Latino Studies presents: Martínez in Retrospect: Las Americas César A. Martínez has long been recognized as one of the most important figures of the Chicano art movement in Texas and the United States. Deeply rooted in his native South Texas and its Mexican-American culture, Martínez's work also reflects a broad knowledge of the history of art in both Europe and the Americas. This exhibition surveys a collection of the artist's thematically diverse works, from his first widely exhibited works of the mid-1970s through the present. All of the artist's principal thematic groups are included: his distinctive and brilliantly colorful barrio portraits, his highly textural South Texas landscapes, and his varied mestizo series. Media represented are paintings, monotypes, woodcuts, and lithographs. César Augusto Martínez is a product of the border culture of South Texas, including both the small towns of the region such as Laredo and Kingsville and the major metropolitan area of San Antonio. Both of his parents were born in Northern Mexico and came to Texas as children with their families in the years after the Mexican Revolution. César was born in Laredo, Texas in 1944. His father died before he was a year old and he was brought up by his mother, who worked as a drugstore cashier until her retirement in the mid-1970s, and by his grandmother and his mother's two unmarried sisters. In San Antonio, Martínez was one of the founders of the important Chicano periodical of the 1970s Caracol, for which he served as photographer, designer, and occasional columnist. He also joined the groups Con Safos, one of the first Chicano visual arts organizations, founded in San Antonio by the artists Mel Casas and Felipe Reyes; and Los Quemados, which he co-founded with Carmen Lomas Garza and Amado Peña. Currently, Martínez no longer does art photography but dedicates himself to painting and lithography. |
View Other Crossroads Gallery shows: El Llanto del Papel: Latino Legends in Two Dimensions Expressions of the Figure “Timelines” “Nicaragua” Martínez in Retrospect: Las Americas EVOKE 2 PROVOKE Re-imagining Visual Vocabularies Paradise: Selected Pieces Fabricating the Real; Artists from L.A. |
© 2007 Institute for Latino Studies, University of Notre Dame •• Comments & Suggestions?
