Patrick Martinez

Patrick Martinez maintains a diverse practice that includes mixed media landscape paintings, neon sign pieces, cake paintings, and his Pee Chee series of appropriative works. The landscape paintings are abstractions composed of Los Angeles surface content; e.g. distressed stucco, spray paint, window security bars, vinyl signage, ceramic tile, neon sign elements, and other recognizable materials. These works serve to evoke place and socio-economic position, and further unearth sites of personal, civic and cultural loss.

Patrick’s neon sign works are fabricated to mirror street level commercial signage, but are remixed to present words and phrases drawn from literary and oratorical sources. His acrylic on panel Cake paintings memorialize leaders, activists, and thinkers, and the Pee Chee series documents the threats posed to black and brown youth by law enforcement.

Patrick Martinez (b. 1980, Pasadena, CA) earned his BFA with honors from Art Center College of Design in 2005. His work has been exhibited domestically and internationally in Los Angeles, Mexico City, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Miami, New York, Seoul, and the Netherlands, at venues including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian NMAAHC, the Tucson Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Vincent Price Art Museum, the Museum of Latin American Art, the Crocker Art Museum, the Rollins Art Museum, the California African American Museum, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and El Museo del Barrio, among others.

Patrick’s work resides in the permanent collections of The Broad, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA), Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Rubell Museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the California African American Museum, the Autry Museum of the American West, the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Tucson Museum of Art, the Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, the University of North Dakota Permanent Collection, the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, the Crocker Art Museum, the Escalette Permanent Collection of Art at Chapman University, the Manetti-Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, the Rollins Museum of Art, and the Museum of Latin American Art, among others.

Patrick was awarded a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island, FL. In the fall of 2021 Patrick was the subject of a solo museum exhibition at the Tucson Museum of Art entitled Look What You Created. In 2022, Patrick was awarded a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Patrick’s suite of ten neon pieces purchased by the Whitney Museum of American Art was a yearlong exhibition installed on the Kenneth C. Griffin Hall in the entrance of the Museum. Patrick Martinez’s “Ghost Land” exhibition was on view at the ICA San Francisco through January 2024.

Through April 2024, Patrick’s work was shown at The Broad in Los Angeles as part of the exhibition “Desire, Knowledge, and Hope (with Smog)”. Patrick’s solo exhibition at the Dallas Contemporary Museum “Histories” is on view through January 2025.

Patrick lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and is represented by Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles.

CV (PDF)