When Frieze Los Angeles’s 2023 version opens on the Santa Monica Airport subsequent week (16-19 February), the migrant staff who energy California’s mighty agricultural trade can 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 Influence Prize, which recognises socially engaged work and supplies a platform for it on the honest. Martinez receives $25,000 and a solo stand showcasing works from his Sin Bandana sequence, large-scale portraits of migrant agricultural staff 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 choosing the produce we eat,” the artist mentioned in an announcement. “I painting farmworkers on discarded produce containers many occasions collected from grocery shops. This permits me to replicate upon the disparities of socioeconomic existence, that of the farmworkers and agribusiness house owners.”
Narsiso Martinez, Contemporary Asparagus, 2022 Courtesy the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles
That is the second yr the Frieze Influence 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 various and nuanced,” Outline American founder Jose Antonio Vargas mentioned in an announcement. “Narsiso Martinez’s portraits of migrant farm staff convey to life advanced, compelling, and genuine immigrant tales which are typically missed, 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 honest’s inaugural version in 2019. Titled Life Measurement (2019), it depicted a physique digicam like these worn by law enforcement officials.
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).
