Alex Martinez

Alex Martinez is a first-generation queer Chicana artist and educator based in Oakland, California. She earned her B.A. in Painting and Printmaking at San Francisco State University and holds dual credentials in Moderate to Severe Special Education and Multiple Subjects. In her role as a teaching artist, she partners with such organizations as the Museum of Children’s Arts (MOCHA), Richmond Art Center and Leap Arts in Education, and she is privileged to spend her days teaching Art in Bay Area elementary and middle schools.

As a mixed medium artist, she has examined themes of queer POC identities, intergenerational trauma and wisdom, Wild Woman archetypes, politics of landscape, spirituality, ritual, healing, and resilience. Locas/Wild Women, her mixed medium painting series, included linoleum block printing, stitching and embellishments framing acrylic paintings of solitary nudes in their personal dreamscapes. She has shown mixed medium paintings at the James C. Hormel LGBTQI Center at the San Francisco Public Library. As part of the Mexican Museum in San Francisco’s Day of the Dead Altar Exhibition, she collaborated on a mixed medium altar, presenting clay nichos, clay replicas of popular Mexican ephemera and hand-dyed silk screened papel picado.

Ignited while Artist in Residence at Caldera Arts in Sisters, OR, she is researching and building a playful series of mixed medium paintings which aims to highlight the landscape of perseverance and resilience found buried in the fabric of her family history and woven into the stories passed on to her.