Patrick Martinez, artworks from 2021

Patrick Martinez: My name is Patrick Martinez. I'm a Los Angeles based artist.

What we're looking at is a neon collage that I have installed in the Whitney lobby. The pieces that kind of are inspired by neon signage found in my city of Los Angeles in neon, mom and pop type businesses, the storefronts of those businesses and advertising specific businesses like income tax, checks cash, pawn shop, 24 karat gold jewelry shops.

Some of these messages I create on my own. Some of them are from oratorical sources, poetry readings, things that I'm reading, things from the past, things from the present, kind of that need to be re-presented and kind of revisited and kind of heard again.

Like, "No struggle, no progress" coming from Frederick Douglass that needed to be heard in 2020. So a lot of this stuff was coming out of injustices that we were seeing in America, the administration from the past and the White House stepping down, just stepping on a lot of the people in America or just them feeling it. And we’re seeing it spill out onto the streets with the many protests between 2016 and 2020.

I started working with neon in 2008. And I was driving from my studio to my apartment through East Los Angeles. And I started seeing it at night. Businesses that would be closed had their neon signs on advertising their business. People driving by these places and walking by them, and the neons would still promote their business. So that kind of gave me the idea it felt like the city was speaking back to me. So I wanted to use that.