Friday, December 1, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum will open Narsiso Martinez: From These Hands, the celebrated artist’s East Coast museum debut. Organized by Andrea Alvarez, Associate Curator at the Buffalo AKG, the solo exhibition will feature a selection of works that exemplify the artist’s unique practice of combining drawing and painting on reclaimed produce boxes. The exhibition will run from December 1, 2023, through April 22, 2024. 

Since arriving to the United States in the late 1990s, Martinez (Mexican, born 1977) has dedicated his practice to depicting and elevating the labor of his fellow migrant farmworkers. Martinez borrows the visual languages of historically white, European portraiture, as well as Christian and other religious iconography, in order to reclaim and celebrate the marginalized groups whose erasure so often leads to their disenfranchisement and struggle. The presentation of the exhibition in the Hemicycle Gallery in the Buffalo AKG’s neoclassical Robert and Elisabeth Wilmers Building places Martinez’s contemporary explorations of traditional portraiture in dialogue with nineteenth-century examples of these modes of representation.

“We are thrilled to be presenting this thought-provoking and timely exhibition to showcase Narsiso’s incredible work,” said Andrea Alvarez, Associate Curator at the Buffalo AKG. “The value of essential workers and migrant laborers has become such a politicized topic in recent years, and the museum is proud to be showcasing these artworks to drive awareness to the important issues faced by many marginalized people, especially those who bring food to our tables.”

“I am honored that the first solo exhibition of my work on the East Coast will be presented at the Buffalo AKG,” said Narsiso Martinez. “The hands of immigrant laborers feed the entire nation, and their stories are American stories. It is a privilege to share the beauty and dignity of the lives of these people—my people—with the world.”

Martinez earned his Master of Fine Arts in drawing and painting from California State University Long Beach in 2018, where he was awarded the Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture.  Since then, his work has been the subject of twelve solo exhibitions at institutions including ICA San Diego and the Museum of Latin American Art (MoLAA), Long Beach, CA, and included in more than thirty group exhibitions. In 2023, Martinez won the prestigious Frieze Impact Prize. His work is in numerous museum collections, including those of MoLAA; Orange County Museum of Art; Phoenix Art Museum; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and University of Arizona Museum of Art.

About the Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Founded in 1862, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) is the sixth-oldest public art institution in the United States. For more than 160 years, the Buffalo AKG has collected, conserved, and exhibited the art of its time, often working directly with living artists. This tradition has given rise to one of the world’s most extraordinary collections of modern and contemporary art.

In summer 2023, following the completion of the most significant campus development and expansion project in its history, the Buffalo AKG opened anew to the public. The project is funded by a $230 million capital campaign, the largest such campaign for a cultural institution in the history of Western New York, including $195 million raised for construction and $35 million in additional operating endowment funds.

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