Built upon grassroots organizing and political thought, Mildred Beltré Martinez’s creative practice comprises an expanded field of printmaking, drawing, and sculpture. She draws upon the work of writers that deploy imagination as a political tool to inform our experience. Mirroring an ethnic and gendered experience of living in the United States, Beltré Martinez creates work that is warm, funny, difficult at times, and part of a larger tradition of Black and Latinx activist art.
Without Is As Within brings together Beltré Martinez’s interest in prefigurative political imagination (an approach to political action in which activists model the social relationships they seek to achieve more broadly) in addition to notions of family, memory, loss, and protection. Both custom yardages used to construct this work were based on a photograph of furniture, specifically a sofa and a recliner that were anchors of Beltré Martinez’s memories of her grandparents.
Conceived and produced during the summer when Beltré Martinez’s twin children were preparing to leave their family home to attend college, Without Is As Within is a complex representation of a family in transition: a parent’s self-aware desire to remain close, support growth, and provide shelter and protection, while grappling with the loss that accompanies changing family dynamics. With stools arranged under a roof-like structure, Beltré Martinez creates the possibility for intimate connections.
