Shantell Martin: WAY* YAY**

From WAY* to YAY**, artist Shantell Martin translated her intricate, dynamic drawing style into whimsical textiles in the hope of making someone’s day.

* Who are you?

Shantell Martin is an English artist. But it’s not that black and white.

Martin works in drawing, creating lively figures and worlds through her illustrations. She has collaborated across sectors on things with people and places—from shoes, furniture, and textiles to murals, installations, and Times Square. She typically works in black on white, developing a distinctive style. Her characteristic style is often achieved through improvisation and stream-of-consciousness creation. To Martin, “art is a self-exploration where you’re getting to understand yourself and the world outside of you by creating—by using your hands, by, you know, putting everything in your heart and in your head into your hands and putting that into the world.” The point of art, she says more simply, is “making and sharing, making and sharing.”

After growing up in working-class London and attending Central Saint Martins, she moved to Tokyo, and her time there shaped her identity as a queer woman due to the isolation she felt in that culture. But there she started the performance aspect of her artistic practice, acting as a VJ (visual jockey) alongside DJs in Japanese clubs. As she has grown as an artist, however, she has evolved in her identity. As a Black, queer woman, she notes: “Being the person that I am gives myself a certain voice and a certain perspective, which I think I have the responsibility to share. And, you know, I think the more stories we hear of that, the less it becomes black and white.”

Through her “WAY” acronym, she questions, “Who are you?” Her answer:

** You are you

“You are you” (abbreviated “YAY”) is Martin’s affirmation that you are enough. Martin’s practice is rooted in intuition and self-confidence, built over decades of evolution and self-discovery—questioning, “WAY?” to “YAY.”

As part of her improvisational approach, Martin prefers to create in real time. She explains: “When you plan and when you think, you give space for insecurities, you give space for feeling not good enough, you leave space for wanting maybe to be someone else other than yourself. When you create live, and you create spontaneously and intuitively, it’s as true and as honest as the product can ever be.”

Her collaboration with Momentum Group to create a line of four textiles was thus a departure from her typically spontaneous, performance-driven work. Martin had hesitations around working in a fixed, reproducible medium, given how the direct spontaneity of her drawing, she feels, lends to its authenticity. But she ultimately found the proposition to be a good fit: “What really sparked my interest was that [Momentum Group] really felt like a collaborative group who were interested in creating very high-quality textiles that would give my work another dimension, and that’s really what excited me. It was a new world to play in and explore and I absolutely fell in love with the process and learning about the craft and the people behind the work.” She created with Momentum the patterns Places Spaces Faces, Well Well Well, Today Here Now, and Why Why Why, the former two of which have been acquired into Cooper Hewitt’s collection. Martin sees these textiles in dialogue with her larger body of work: “Each is almost like a seed or a snippet or a positive message taken from my drawing.”

As part of Cooper Hewitt’s 2017 exhibition Making | Breaking: New Arrivals, the Places Spaces Faces and Well Well Well patterns were used to upholster cushions on the seating in the museum’s conservatory, a large, windowed space with views into the campus’s garden on the edge of Central Park. “For me [Places Spaces Faces] was a really, kind of, great piece to use because it’s about the city. It’s about kind of the inside and the outside. And it’s about, kind of, this growth within cities.” Martin’s textile captures the vistas of the many cities she has called home—London, Tokyo, Brooklyn, Jersey City—attempting to capture how buildings hold our stories. “She is drawn to buildings,” writes Matilda McQuaid, curatorial director at Cooper Hewitt, “because they invite curiosity and wonder—who lives inside, what do they do, or how do they live. Highlighted periodically with yellow lines, building tops become faces, animating the textile with humor and optimism.”

“So I’m really excited to see where the textiles end up because it’s the first time I’ve kind of let the drawings or let the work kind of live and be free by itself. The thing with art is that when you do put it out there, you put it out there in a way where people can discover it. And when they discover it, you know, that could improve their day. It could improve their week. It might have planted or inspired them to do something that they haven’t done before.”

YAY!

Hear Martin speak more about these pieces in Cooper Hewitt’s collection.

 

Matthew J. Kennedy is the Publications Associate at Cooper Hewitt. He additionally serves as History & Collections Chair of Smithsonian Pride Alliance, an LGBTQIA+ employee resource group within the Smithsonian.

 

Sources

Daryn Carp and Liz Culley, hosts, Scissoring Isn’t a Thing, podcast, season 1, episode 28, “Scissoring Isn’t a Thing with Shantell Martin,” Embassy Row, October 20, 2020, https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/scissoring-isnt-a-thing/episodes/Scissoring-Isnt-a-Thing-with-Shantell-Martin-el9r62.

“Shantell Martin, Places Spaces Faces and Well Well Well Textiles at Cooper Hewitt,” Cooper Hewitt, May 19, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhCOF5pCNtU.

Matilda McQuaid, curatorial files of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, February 24, 2017.

“NEW/NOW | Interview with Shantell Martin,” New Britain Museum of American Art, https://www.nbmaa.org/interview-with-shantell-martin.

 

Related

While Martin’s work is distinct and stands on its own, it can also be considered in conversation with the work of other queer illustrators such as Keith Haring, a gay artist active in New York City before his early death from complications related to AIDS in 1990. Like Martin, Haring immersed himself in a variety of creative circles and collaborations and applied his artistic vision across murals, graphic design, apparel, and more.