Narsiso Martinez (b. 1977, Santa Cruz Papalutla, Oaxaca, Mexico) migrated to the US when he was twenty years old and worked for nine years in the apple orchards of Eastern Washington to finance his education. He completed high school in 2006 at the age of twenty-nine. In 2018 he received a Master of Fine Arts in drawing and painting from California State University Long Beach, and was awarded the Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture. His work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, MOLAA, University of Arizona Museum of Art, Long Beach Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Martinez was awarded the Frieze Impact Award in 2023. Martinez lives and works in Long Beach, CA.
Martinez’s drawings and mixed media installations include multi-figure compositions set amidst agricultural landscapes. Drawn from his own experience as a farmworker, Martinez’s work focuses on the people performing the labors necessary to fill produce sections and restaurant kitchens around the country. Martinez makes visible the difficult labor and onerous conditions of the “American farmworker,” itself a compromised piece of language owing to the industry’s conspicuous use of undocumented workers.