Entering Delita Martin’s exhibition “Sometimes My Blues Change Color” at Featherstone Center for the Arts is a transformative experience. Along the wall are impressively large, arresting works that break the boundaries of our world and touch the transcendent, spiritual realm.
Martin, who is the first female Black artist to have a solo show in the Francine Kelly Gallery at Featherstone. says, “My work, at its core, is about spiritual identity and how women, particularly women of color, become their spiritual other. It’s about exploring how we visualize ourselves in prayer, meditation, and as our spiritual other, which is who we are when we release worldly attachment.”
Martin is compelled to explore what she calls the “veilscape,” which sits between the waking and spirit worlds and is one she believes we all inhabit. “That’s the space I want to capture in my art to tell the story of the women in this gallery,” she says. “You are constantly transitioning in and out of that space; we just don’t recognize it. I’m curious as to what that looks like.”
“The challenge for me was how to visually describe this space. It became color, texture, and pattern. When you see the figure going in and out of the pattern and see it on the skin, it references the woman is transitioning into her spiritual space.”
The artist works intuitively. “I always want the work to come from my heart. I find I can’t do that when I plan.” Martin explains that the most she does is to decide on a particular color she will explore or whether to undertake a portrait or a full figure. “That’s as much planning as I do. I react to the piece because I feel I’m a conduit for the work itself.”
Her impressive site-specific, mixed-media prints cover vast swathes of wall space. The fractured shapes recall Afro-Cubism — the abstract quality of the broken planes in African sculpture that influenced Picasso and Braque’s early 20th-century Cubist period. “I wanted to talk about Cubism from a more contemporary standpoint. I refer to it as Afro-Cubism and brought it to a two-D structure.”
Martin pieces each artwork together, intersplicing organic shapes that bear pre-existing patterns as well as her printed, drawn, and painted images that she renders in charcoal, pastel, and gold leaf. There are also bits of hand stitching, which she learned at her grandmother’s knee, tying the artist to her matrilineal heritage. “During those sessions, my grandmother would talk to me about my family and tell me all kinds of history. In a way, she was stitching together who I was and who I was going to become. It was a natural step to bring her into the work.”
In most of the portraits, the striking women gaze out, thereby incorporating us in the transitional “veilscape.” In this way, Martin says, “It evens the playing field. Wherever you go in the gallery, there are eyes on you.”
In “Here I Stand,” the model, back turned to us, looks over her shoulder, staring us in the eye. While one of the sisters in “Dreamers II” looks upward toward the heavens, the other connects with us in her outward glance.
In “The Beauty Within,” the figure sits high up, looking down but with a gentle gaze that is far from threatening. She seems lost in thought or contemplation of that spiritual “other” place.
The round orbs surrounding the woman’s countenance in “Moonlight Starlight” evoke a sense of the goddess within.
“Dreamers I” speaks of the bond between mother and child as the woman looks down with transformative pure love.
Whether the women are friends, acquaintances, or hired models, it’s essential for Martin to feel a personal connection with them all. She previously depicted figures that were an amalgam of several different women. She explains that focusing on specific people now, “I became curious about what it would look like to see my mother or sister or even myself in the ‘veilscape.’ It was totally different creating this body of work. I think, too, it deepened the relationship I had with those individuals. When you draw someone, it’s a very intimate process. You learn a lot about them.”
The specificity of the portraits creates an intimacy with and experience of the work. For instance, we are drawn into Martin’s self-portrait “The Me/Must Remember,” which she did shortly after her mother died during the pandemic. Hand to brow, in deep thought, Martin shares, “I was going through a time when I couldn’t see myself, where I was, or how I was existing. It was hard because the world had completely shut down. My compass was broken. I started doing self-portraits to heal and figure out where I was.”
Many different, alluring shades of blue mix and mingle and dominate each piece. As they overlap, the various hues create that sense of the person existing in multiple spaces simultaneously. “I’ve always been drawn to blue. It’s the color that centers me. If I’m ever lost, I can follow that color back to find my way.” The color is also symbolic.
“The women featured in my work are not necessarily high-powered in the world. But I stand on the shoulders of women like this, and their stories are important. I want viewers to understand that their stories are important, too.”
Delita Martin’s “Sometimes My Blues Change Color” is open daily from 12 to 4 pm at Featherstone Center for the Arts.
