‘Telling everybody’s story’: An immigrant artist dares to dream
When Adriana Martinez moved from Colima, Mexico, to the United States at the age of 1, she and her family were undocumented.
“Everything that I have known is being in the United States. But it was very tough growing up being undocumented because it was something that you couldn’t share,” said Martinez. “It is actually difficult to share it now.”
Martinez moved around as a child, living in Los Angles, the Inland Empire and Orange County, where she attended middle school and high school. The multimedia artist, muralist, educator and community art advocate is currently protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration policy also known as the Dream Act.
“I am protected under DACA and it has given me a lot of opportunities to go to school,” said Martinez. “But they are trying to get rid of it all the time, as if our lives and our dreams and what we are doing out here in our communities is nothing. That is a constant battle.”
Martinez said her immigration story is full of complexities. She lived with a fear of separation from her family and felt targeted as a person of color.
But in spite of its immigration status, Martinez said her family was able to build a life full of happy memories, like eating birthday cake, spending weekends at Griffith Park and visiting Southern California amusement parks.
“As an undocumented person, we can get really stuck in survival mode,” Martinez said. “It is about celebrating our lives and all the struggles that have gone into us being able to live out our dreams.”
Family photos of such memories are the basis of Martinez’s exhibition at Santa Ana’s Grand Central Art Center, “Dreamer.”
“This is my immigration story,” said Martinez, “retelling it through family photographs.”
In the exhibition, which opens on April 1 during First Saturday Art Walk from 7 to 10 p.m., Martinez tells her story through a series of watercolor recreations of the photos, designed to encourage viewers to reflect on their own familial backgrounds and stories.
The actual photos that inspired the show are fanned out on a white table in the gallery, grounding the show to Martinez. But the unfinished nature of the watercolor paintings, with recognizable landmarks only partly filled in and faces that are blank, challenges viewers to see themselves in the work.
“These are photos of my family, but they are painted in a manner that invites the viewer to finish the painting off with their imagination or also insert themselves in these common experiences,” said Martinez, “like going to Universal Studios, going to Disneyland, having a birthday party, having a picnic at Griffith Park.”
The colors that bleed so seamlessly into each other in the paintings give them a dreamlike quality, and the scenes have just enough familiarity to conjure feelings of déjà vu.
“In telling my story, I am also telling everybody’s story and talking about dreaming and what does that look like … fulfilling our purpose as people, as individuals. It is humanizing our experiences.”
Dreams Martinez has achieved include earning her bachelor’s degree in studio art from Cal State Fullerton and receiving her teaching credential from Cal State Long Beach this year.
As an artist and Dreamer, Martinez also feels a responsibility to give back.
In 2018, Martinez established Sketchbook Club, promoting creativity through sketchbooks, and she secured a 2020 Santa Ana Art and Culture grant to continue the work of providing accessibility to creative process and free art materials.
“I feel like being a dreamer is about paying it forward. How are you empowering others? Not everybody has the opportunity to follow their dreams,” said Martinez. “I think about the people in cages, I think about the families being separated, I think about this tension between America and Mexico. It can weigh very heavy.”
Today, Martinez is the last of her family to be undocumented, and through art she has found a means to share that complex struggle in a way she never could growing up.
“For me as an artist, making these paintings doesn’t seem like much … I am not a doctor or anything, but I am here to be a reflection, a mirror and to empower my community,” said Martinez.
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