Martinez’s Conocerla is on display at the Korn Gallery through October 16
September 2026 – Drew University’s Art Department has welcomed Artist-in-Residence Amanda Martinez for a gallery talk and exhibit on campus.
Martinez will present an exhibit, Conocerla, which will be on display at the Korn Gallery in organized by Jason Karolak, associate teaching professor of art. Martinez will discuss her work at a gallery talk September 17 from 4-6 p.m.
The exhibit includes work made at Drew with students as part of Martinez’s residency, in addition to her own recent sculptural works and large-scale wall drawings in adobe mortar.
The Korn Gallery is open Tuesdays through Fridays from 12-4 p.m. and by appointment.
About the exhibition:
Conocerla: To know her
“Her – To know oneself, one’s place on earth, one’s people, one’s responsibility – To know through cultural teachings, through cosmology, through remembering, through lived experience, through embodiment.”
Artist-in-Residence Amanda Martinez presents an evolving exhibition of recent sculptural works, two site-specific wall-drawings in adobe mortar, and new work made on site in collaboration with Drew students. The works appear geometric, abstract, and architectural, putting them in conversation with the history of minimal and post-minimal sculpture from the late 20th century into the present. Eschewing the mechanical aspects often associated with that history, the works of Martinez are distinctly hand-made, employing natural materials, and connecting us to much older traditions of constructing that include the vernaculars of adobe (mudbrick) architecture, embroidery, and basketry indigenous to New Mexico and the Southwest.
The repetition of forms and patterns in this work suggest process and evolution, as well as parts that can be recombined into different iterations, which puts forth a sense of open possibility. There is a presence of quiet meditation coupled with strong, architectonic form, leaving the viewer with an opportunity to associate and interpret these works in multiple ways. Building her ritualistic practice over many years, Martinez has synthesized aspects of her experience, including autism and queerness, into a cohesive visual language that is all her own. For Martinez, working abstractly allows for the embodiment of ideas into form, engaging in contemporary conditions while suggesting a timeless connection to her ancestral roots.
About the artist:
Amanda Martínez: b. 1988, Greenville, SC (Tsalagihi Ayeli) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY (Lenapehoking).
Inventing her own language of geometric abstraction, fashioning stencils or “profiles” of undulating shapes as distinct units of measurement, she maps out and carves her sculptures into discrete building blocks with infinite possible configurations. Martínez’s work draws upon her intergenerational family history of working in adobe (earthen construction) as well as the visual languages of southwestern vernacular architecture and craft movements.
Martínez received her Bachelors in Fine Arts from Kansas City Art Institute. She was a 2025 recipient of the Lighthouse Works Fellowship and recently completed Cercado, an installation in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden as part of the Ankhlave Garden Project Fellowship. Solo presentations of her work include The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; Ridgefield, CT; Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya, Japan; Here Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA; HESSE FLATOW, New York, NY and elsewhere. Her work has been reviewed in Curbed, Surface Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times among others.
