When Frieze Los Angeles’s 2023 version opens on the Santa Monica Airport subsequent week (16-19 February), the migrant employees who energy California’s mighty agricultural trade might be entrance and centre due to the work of Narsiso Martinez.
The Mexico-born, Lengthy Seaside-based artist has been awarded this yr’s Frieze Impression Prize, which recognises socially engaged work and offers a platform for it on the truthful. Martinez receives $25,000 and a solo stand showcasing works from his Sin Bandana collection, large-scale portraits of migrant agricultural employees realised on discarded produce containers.
“Drawn from my very own experiences as a farmworker, I pay homage to the individuals who toil within the fields selecting the produce we devour,” the artist mentioned in a press release. “I painting farmworkers on discarded produce containers many instances collected from grocery shops. This enables me to replicate upon the disparities of socioeconomic life, that of the farmworkers and agribusiness homeowners.”
Narsiso Martinez, Contemporary Asparagus, 2022 Courtesy the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles
That is the second yr the Frieze Impression Prize has been awarded; in 2022, the inaugural version went to artists Mary Baxter, Maria Gaspar and Dread Scott. This yr, the prize is a partnership between Frieze and Outline American, a non-profit that helps storytelling across the experiences of immigrants.
“Immigrants usually are not a monolith; their tales are numerous and nuanced,” Outline American founder Jose Antonio Vargas mentioned in a press release. “Narsiso Martinez’s portraits of migrant farm employees deliver to life complicated, compelling, and genuine immigrant tales which can be usually ignored, but a part of the American expertise.”
The prize was impressed by a piece created by the Los Angeles-based artist Mark Bradford and proven on the truthful’s inaugural version in 2019. Titled Life Measurement (2019), it depicted a physique digicam like these worn by cops.
Martinez’s work was chosen by a jury consisting of Vargas, Mexican American artist and activist Tanya Aguiñiga, and collector Ariel Emanuel, who’s the chief government of leisure firm Endeavor (Frieze’s majority shareholder).
