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colored pencil and oil pastel, Courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York © Mario Martinez 

Mario Martinez (Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona)

## *Esoteric Vibration Landscape*, 2019

**NARRATOR:**

What do you see in this vibrant, turbulent landscape by artist Mario Martinez?  You’ll be hard pressed to find much Native American imagery – or any recognizable imagery at all.  Martinez is a great admirer of abstract painters like Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, and his work reflects this influence – the swirling colors, the energetic brushstrokes...

**MARIO MARTINEZ:**

**Being an abstract painter in the Indian field was not the usual, and so I always felt very different about it.  I knew that it was different, but I was going to persist in doing it because that’s the only way that I knew how to do it.**

****

**But it’s my version of abstraction that comes from old sources like modernism, and my tribe and the concepts and spiritual awarenesses in my tribe all melding together.**

****

**NARRATOR:**

Martinez is an enrolled member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona. 

**MM:**

**In our ceremonies, we don’t allow pictures.  I just knew that those things were sacred to us.**

****

**So I don’t ever give myself license to, in general, express Native concepts or culture or images the way maybe other artists can and do.**

****

**Sometimes there are certain designs in my paintings that arise from Indigenous designs or specifically Yaqui designs in a very abstracted way, and they mean something to me, but I don’t say what they mean to the general public.**

****

**NARRATOR:**

In place of recognizable cultural references, Martinez offers a more idiosyncratic vision of the physical and metaphysical world.  Yet he believes others will still be able to find meaning and connection in his life-affirming abstractions.

**MM:**

**And it’s really a landscape. It’s nature. It’s natural forms. It’s organic.  All life is there, I hope, in my version.**

The Land Carries Our Ancestors

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