Carolyn Jean Martin

Instagram: @carolynjeanmartin

Website: https://carolynjeanmartin.com/home.html

Bio: Carolyn Jean Martin is an artist and educator. Her multi-media practice explores how identity is constructed and understood within the social lenses of nationality, ethnicity and race, and how these are sustained and transformed through movements of the diaspora. Her artwork has appeared in solo and group exhibitions in China, Canada, and various locations in the United States. Carolyn received an MFA in painting and an MA in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art from the San Francisco Art Institute. She completed her PhD in Visual Arts: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts as a David Driskell Fellow. Her dissertation, The Historical Presence and Vernacular Traditions of Black Women Artists Since 1980 received the 2024 Ted Coons Dissertation Prize.

Statement: “The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away.” Walter Benjamin, A Destructive Character, 1931. A constant cycle of creation and destruction permeates my work as it reflects Benjamin’s cheerful and rejuvenating aspects of destruction. I am interested in superficial surface beauty and the conditions of value placed upon it, but also the ability to make a mark that disrupts and alters it to reveal what lies underneath the surface. In truth, I am fascinated with the traces that destruction leaves behind and the indication of the past existing within the present.