On July 8th, 2023, Gabo Martinez, the artist behind The Land of Flowers, and the exhibition’s curator, María-Elisa Heg, led an intimate walkthrough of this new body of work in ceramic and print.

Martinez’s vibrant work centers a reclamation of indigenous identity through craft production. Her vivid terracotta vessels and large-scale prints feature motifs like the flower, a deeply significant symbol in the poetic tradition of Nahuatl speakers, known as In xochitl In cuicatl (Flower and Song). This exhibition transforms the Front Gallery at HCCC into a space vibrating with color and possibility that richly evokes Martinez’s vision of a present and future defined by community, joy, and self-determination.

About Gabo Martinez
Based in San Marcos, Texas, Gabo Martinez is an interdisciplinary artist who was born in Guanajuato, Mexico. Drawing on traditional and contemporary motifs, Martinez utilizes those visual languages to craft a narrative that reclaims and honors her own heritage. She combines the mediums of printmaking and ceramics to create spaces that evoke the warmth of brown bodies with rich vibrant colors. These spaces become vehicles for the reclamation of an historical clay body, known as barro rojo, in the contemporary moment, elevating ancestral ceramic technologies. Barro rojo lends its softness and malleability to objects that can further immortalize cultures and narratives.

Martinez holds a BFA in studio arts with a concentration in ceramics from Texas State University at San Marcos. She is a founder of the Tepeyac Collective, a group that aims to organize and highlight BIPOC clay artists in Central Texas as a response to the lack of diversity and harmful gatekeeping within the present-day clay community. Martinez has completed residencies at the Sonoma Community Center, in California, and at Texas A&M University, in Laredo, Texas. She has been featured in Ceramics Monthly, as well as the Glasstire “4×4” series.

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